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1 North America as defined by early-twentieth-century ethnologists (inset: The ethno-linguistic ‘shatter zone’ of Northern California)
(After C. D. Wissler (1913), ‘The North American Indians of the Plains’, Popular Science Monthly 82; A. L. Kroeber (1925), Handbook of the Indians of California. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 78. Washington, DC : Smithsonian Institution.)
2 The ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East – Neolithic farmers in a world of Mesolithic hunter-foragers, 8500–8000 BC
(Adapted from an original map by A. G. Sherratt, courtesy S. Sherratt.)
3 Independent centres of plant and animal domestication
(Adapted from an original map, courtesy D. Fuller.)
4 Nebelivka: a prehistoric ‘mega-site’ in the Ukrainian forest-steppe
(Based an original map drawn by Y. Beadnell on the basis of data from D. Hale; courtesy J. Chapman and B. Gaydarska.)
5 Teotihuacan: residential apartments surrounding major monuments in the central districts
(Adapted from R. Millon (1973), The Teotihuacán Map. Austin: University of Texas Press, courtesy the Teotihuacan Mapping Project and M. E. Smith.)
6 Some key archaeological sites in the Mississippi River basin and adjacent regions
(Adapted from an original map, courtesy T. R. Pauketat.)
7 Above: arrangement of different clans (1–5) in an Osage village. Below: How representatives of the same clans arranged themselves inside a lodge for a major ritual.
(After A. C. Fletcher and F. La Flesche (1911), ‘The Omaha tribe’. Twenty-seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1905–6. Washington D.C.: Bureau of American Ethnology; and F. La Flesche (1939), War Ceremony and Peace Ceremony of the Osage Indians . Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 101. Washington: US Government.)
David Rolfe Graeber died aged fifty-nine on 2 September 2020, just over three weeks after we finished writing this book, which had absorbed us for more than ten years. It began as a diversion from our more ‘serious’ academic duties: an experiment, a game almost, in which an anthropologist and an archaeologist tried to reconstruct the sort of grand dialogue about human history that was once quite common in our fields, but this time with modern evidence. There were no rules or deadlines. We wrote as and when we felt like it, which increasingly became a daily occurrence. In the final years before its completion, as the project gained momentum, it was not uncommon for us to talk two or three times a day. We would often lose track of who came up with what idea or which new set of facts and examples; it all went into ‘the archive’, which quickly outgrew the scope of a single book. The result is not a patchwork but a true synthesis. We could sense our styles of writing and thought converging by increments into what eventually became a single stream. Realizing we didn’t want to end the intellectual journey we’d embarked on, and that many of the concepts introduced in this book would benefit from further development and exemplification, we planned to write sequels: no less than three. But this first book had to finish somewhere, and at 9.18 p.m. on 6 August David Graeber announced, with characteristic Twitter-flair (and loosely citing Jim Morrison), that it was done: ‘My brain feels bruised with numb surprise.’ We got to the end just as we’d started, in dialogue, with drafts passing constantly back and forth between us as we read, shared and discussed the same sources, often into the small hours of the night. David was far more than an anthropologist. He was an activist and public intellectual of international repute who tried to live his ideas about social justice and liberation, giving hope to the oppressed and inspiring countless others to follow suit. The book is dedicated to the fond memory of David Graeber (1961–2020) and, as he wished, to the memory of his parents, Ruth Rubinstein Graeber (1917–2006) and Kenneth Graeber (1914–1996). May they rest together in peace.
2020 年 9 月 2 日,大卫·罗尔夫·格雷伯去世,享年 59 岁,就在我们写完这本书的三个多星期后,这本书吸引了我们十多年的时间。这本书开始时是为了转移我们更 “严肃” 的学术职责:一个实验,几乎是一个游戏,其中一个人类学家和一个考古学家试图重建关于人类历史的那种大对话,这在我们的领域中曾经很常见,但这次是用现代证据。没有规则或最后期限。我们想写就写、想写就写,这越来越成为一种日常现象。在项目完成前的最后几年,随着项目的发展,我们每天谈两三次是常有的事。我们经常会忘记谁提出了什么想法,或者哪一组新的事实和例子;这些都进入了 “档案”,它很快就超出了一本书的范围。其结果不是拼凑,而是一个真正的综合体。我们可以感觉到我们的写作和思想风格在逐步融合,最终成为一个单一的流。意识到我们不想结束我们已经开始的智力旅程,而且本书中介绍的许多概念将从进一步的发展和示范中受益,我们计划写续集:不少于三部。但这第一本书必须在某处结束,8 月 6 日晚上 9 点 18 分,大卫·格雷伯在 Twitter 上以特有的热情(松散地引用了吉姆·莫里森的话)宣布,它已经完成。我的大脑因麻木的惊讶而感到伤痕累累。我们在对话中走到了最后,在我们阅读、分享和讨论相同的资料时,草稿在我们之间不断地来回传递,常常到了晚上的凌晨。大卫不仅仅是一位人类学家。他是一位具有国际声誉的活动家和公共知识分子,努力实践他关于社会正义和解放的思想,给被压迫者带来希望,并激励无数人效仿。本书献给大卫·格雷伯(1961-2020)的美好回忆,并如他所愿,献给他的父母鲁斯·鲁宾斯坦·格雷伯(1917-2006)和肯尼斯·格雷伯(1914-1996)。愿他们安息在一起。
Sad circumstances oblige me (David Wengrow) to write these acknowledgements in David Graeber’s absence. He is survived by his wife Nika. David’s passing was marked by an extraordinary outpouring of grief, which united people across continents, social classes and ideological boundaries. Ten years of writing and thinking together is a long time, and it is not for me to guess whom David would have wished to thank in this particular context. His co-travellers along the pathways that led to this book will already know who they are, and how much he treasured their support, care and advice. Of one thing I am certain: this book would not have happened – or at least not in anything remotely like its present form – without the inspiration and energy of Melissa Flashman, our wise counsel at all times in all things literary. In Eric Chinski of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Thomas Penn of Penguin UK we found a superb editorial team and true intellectual partners. For their passionate engagements with and interventions in our thinking over many years, heartfelt thanks to Debbie Bookchin, Alpa Shah, Erhard Schüttpelz and Andrea Luka Zimmerman. For generous, expert guidance on different aspects of the book thanks to: Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, Elizabeth Baquedano, Nora Bateson, Stephen Berquist, Nurit Bird-David, Maurice Bloch, David Carballo, John Chapman, Luiz Costa, Philippe Descola, Aleksandr Diachenko, Kevan Edinborough, Dorian Fuller, Bisserka Gaydarska, Colin Grier, Thomas Grisaffi, Chris Hann, Wendy James, Megan Laws, Patricia McAnany, Barbara Alice Mann, Simon Martin, Jens Notroff, José R. Oliver, Mike Parker Pearson, Timothy Pauketat, Matthew Pope, Karen Radner, Natasha Reynolds, Marshall Sahlins, James C. Scott, Stephen Shennan and Michele Wollstonecroft.
悲哀的情况使我(大卫·温格罗)不得不在大卫·格雷伯不在的情况下写下这些致谢词。他的妻子尼卡在世。大卫的逝世标志着一种非同寻常的悲痛,它将各大洲、社会阶层和意识形态界限的人们团结起来。十年的共同写作和思考是一段很长的时间,在这种特殊的情况下,我不应该猜测大卫希望感谢谁。他在导致这本书的道路上的共同旅行者将已经知道他们是谁,以及他是多么珍惜他们的支持、关怀和建议。有一件事我是肯定的:如果没有梅丽莎·福克曼的灵感和精力,这本书就不会出现 —— 或者至少不会以任何像现在这样的形式出现 —— 我们在所有文学方面的明智建议。在 Farrar, Straus and Giroux 的 Eric Chinski 和 PenguinUK的 Thomas Penn 中,我们找到了一个优秀的编辑团队和真正的智力伙伴。对于他们多年来对我们思想的热情参与和干预,我们衷心感谢黛比·布钦、阿尔帕·沙阿、艾哈德·许特尔兹和安德烈·卢卡·齐默尔曼。对本书不同方面的慷慨的专家指导表示感谢,包括:Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, Elizabeth Baquedano, Nora Bateson, Stephen Berquist, Nurit Bird-David, Maurice Bloch, David Carballo, John Chapman, Luiz Costa, Philippe Descola, Aleksandr Diachenko, Kevan Edinborough, Dorian Fuller, Bisserka Gaydarska, Colin Grier, Thomas Grisaffi, Chris Hann, Wendy James, Megan Laws, Patricia McAnany, Barbara Alice Mann, Simon Martin, Jens Notroff, José R。Oliver, Mike Parker Pearson, Timothy Pauketat, Matthew Pope, Karen Radner, Natasha Reynolds, Marshall Sahlins, James C·Scott, Stephen Shennan 和 Michele Wollstonecroft。
A number of the arguments in this book were first presented as named lectures and in scholarly journals: an earlier version of Chapter Two appeared in French as ‘La sagesse de Kandiaronk: la critique indigène, le mythe du progrès et la naissance de la Gauche’ (La Revue du MAUSS) ; parts of Chapter Three were first presented as ‘Farewell to the childhood of man: ritual, seasonality, and the origins of inequality’ (The 2014 Henry Myers Lecture, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute) ; of Chapter Four as ‘Many seasons ago: slavery and its rejection among foragers on the Pacific Coast of North America’ (American Anthropologist) ; and of Chapter Eight as ‘Cities before the state in early Eurasia’ (The 2015 Jack Goody Lecture, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) .
本书中的一些论点最初是作为命名的讲座和学术期刊提出的:第二章的早期版本以 “La sagesse de Kandiaronk: la critique indigène, le mythe du progrès et la naissance de la Gauche”(La Revue du MAUSS)的形式出现在法语中;第三章的部分内容最初以 《告别人类的童年:仪式、季节性和不平等的起源》(The 2014 Henry Myers Lecture,Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute);第四章的内容为《许多季节以前:北美洲太平洋沿岸的奴隶制及其对觅食者的排斥》(American Anthropologist);第八章为《欧亚大陆早期国家之前的城市》(The 2015 Jack Goody Lecture,Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)。
Thanks to the various academic institutions and research groups that welcomed us to speak and debate on topics relating to this book, and especially to Enzo Rossi and Philippe Descola for memorable occasions at the University of Amsterdam and the Collège de France. James Thomson (formerly editor-in-chief at Eurozine) first helped us get our ideas out into the wider world with the essay ‘How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that’s already happened)’, which he adopted with conviction when other publishing venues shied away; thanks also to the many translators who have extended its audience since; and to Kelly Burdick of Lapham’s Quarterly for inviting our contribution to a special issue on the theme of democracy, where we aired some of the ideas to be found here in Chapter Nine.
感谢各学术机构和研究团体欢迎我们就与本书有关的话题进行演讲和辩论,特别是感谢恩佐·罗西和菲利普·迪斯科拉在阿姆斯特丹大学和法兰西学院举办的令人难忘的场合。詹姆斯·汤姆森(前《欧洲杂志》主编)首先帮助我们将我们的想法传播到更广阔的世界,发表了《如何改变人类历史的进程(至少是已经发生的部分)》一文,当其他出版场所回避时,他坚定地采用了这篇文章;还感谢许多翻译者,他们后来扩大了这篇文章的受众;感谢《拉帕姆季刊》的凯利·伯迪克邀请我们为民主主题的特刊投稿,我们在第九章中提出了一些想法。
From the very beginning, both David and I incorporated our work on this book into our teaching, respectively at the LSE Department of Anthropology and the UCL Institute of Archaeology, so on behalf of both of us I wish to thank our students of the last ten years for their many insights and reflections. Martin, Judy, Abigail and Jack Wengrow were by my side every step of the way. My last and deepest thanks to Ewa Domaradzka for providing both the sharpest criticism and the most devoted support a partner could wish for; you came into my life, much as David and this book did: ‘Rain riding suddenly out of the air, Battering the bare walls of the sun … Rain, rain on dry ground!’
从一开始,大卫和我就把本书的工作纳入了我们的教学中,分别在伦敦经济学院人类学系和伦敦大学考古学研究所,所以我想代表我们两个人感谢我们过去十年的学生,感谢他们的许多见解和思考。马丁、朱迪、阿比盖尔和杰克·温格罗在我身边走过了每一步。我最后也是最深切地感谢 Ewa Domaradzka,她提供了一个伙伴所希望的最尖锐的批评和最忠实的支持;你进入了我的生活,就像大卫和这本书一样。雨水突然从空中飞来,敲打着太阳的光墙…… 雨,雨在干地上!
Or, why this is not a book about the origins of inequality
‘This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the καιρ óς (Kairos) – the right time – for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.’
“这种情绪在政治上、社会上和哲学上到处都能感受到。我们生活在希腊人所说的καιρóς(Kairos)—— 正确的时间 —— ‘诸神的蜕变’,即基本原则和符号的蜕变。”
C. G. Jung,The Undiscovered Self(1958)
C·荣格。未被发现的自我(1958)
Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 BC . Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were.
大部分的人类历史对我们来说已经无可挽回了。我们的物种,智人,已经存在了至少 20 万年,但在这段时间里,我们几乎不知道发生了什么。例如,在西班牙北部的阿尔塔米拉(Altamira)洞穴,绘画和雕刻创造于至少 10,000 年,大约在公元前 25,000 到 15,000 年之间。据推测,在此期间发生了很多戏剧性的事件。可我们却无从知晓其中大部分是什么。
This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly – the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?
这对大多数人来说影响不大,因为大多数人无论如何都很少考虑到人类历史的广泛性。他们没有什么理由去思考。如果这个问题出现了,通常是在反思为什么世界看起来如此混乱,为什么人类经常如此糟糕地对待彼此 —— 战争、贪婪、剥削、对他人痛苦的系统性冷漠的原因。我们一直都是这样的吗?还是在某些时候,有些事情出了大问题?
It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.
这基本上是一场神学辩论。从本质上讲,这个问题是:“人之初性本善还是性本恶?”但是如果你仔细想想,这个问题用这些术语来框定,就没有什么意义。“善” 和 “恶” 是纯粹的人为概念。任何人都不会想到去争论一条鱼或一棵树是善还是恶,因为 “善” 和 “恶” 是人类为了相互比较而提出的概念。因此,争论人类在本质上是善还是恶,与争论人类在本质上是胖还是瘦一样没有意义。
Nonetheless, on those occasions when people do reflect on the lessons of prehistory, they almost invariably come back to questions of this kind. We are all familiar with the Christian answer: people once lived in a state of innocence, yet were tainted by original sin. We desired to be godlike and have been punished for it; now we live in a fallen state while hoping for future redemption. Today, the popular version of this story is typically some updated variation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, which he wrote in 1754. Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’ – which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.
然而,当人们对史前的教训进行反思时,他们几乎无一例外地回到了这样的问题上。我们都熟悉基督教的答案:人们曾经生活在纯真的状态下,但被原罪所玷污。我们渴望成为神一样的人,并因此受到了惩罚;现在我们生活在堕落的状态中,同时希望将来得到救赎。今天,这个故事的流行版本通常是让·雅克·卢梭在 1754 年写的《论人类不平等的起源和基础》的一些最新变化。这个故事说,很久以前,我们是狩猎采集者,长期生活在像孩子一样的纯真状态中,分成族群。这些队伍是平等的;它们也只能是平等的,因为它们是如此之小。只是在 “农业革命” 之后,然后是城市的兴起,这种快乐的状态才结束,迎来了 “文明” 和 “国家” —— 这也意味着书面文学、科学和哲学的出现,但同时也意味着人类生活中几乎所有的坏事:父权制、常备军、大规模处决和恼人的官僚,要求我们花大部分时间来填写表格。
Of course, this is a very crude simplification, but it really does seem to be the foundational story that rises to the surface whenever anyone, from industrial psychologists to revolutionary theorists, says something like ‘but of course human beings spent most of their evolutionary history living in groups of ten or twenty people,’ or ‘agriculture was perhaps humanity’s worst mistake.’ And as we’ll see, many popular writers make the argument quite explicitly. The problem is that anyone seeking an alternative to this rather depressing view of history will quickly find that the only one on offer is actually even worse: if not Rousseau, then Thomas Hobbes.
当然,这是一个非常粗略的简化,但这确实是一个基础性的故事,每当有人,从工业心理学家到革命理论家,说一些诸如 “但当然,人类在进化史上大部分时间都生活在十人或二十人的群体中” 或 “农业可能是人类最糟糕的错误” 之类的话时,它就会浮出水面。正如我们将看到的,许多流行作家相当明确地提出了这个论点。问题是,任何寻求这种相当令人沮丧的历史观的替代方案的人都会很快发现,唯一提供的方案实际上更糟糕:如果不是卢梭,就是托马斯·霍布斯。
Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, is in many ways the founding text of modern political theory. It held that, humans being the selfish creatures they are, life in an original State of Nature was in no sense innocent; it must instead have been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – basically, a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else. Insofar as there has been any progress from this benighted state of affairs, a Hobbesian would argue, it has been largely due to exactly those repressive mechanisms that Rousseau was complaining about: governments, courts, bureaucracies, police. This view of things has been around for a very long time as well. There’s a reason why, in English, the words ‘politics’ ‘polite’ and ‘police’ all sound the same – they’re all derived from the Greek word polis, or city, the Latin equivalent of which is civitas, which also gives us ‘civility,’ ‘civic’ and a certain modern understanding of ‘civilization’.
霍布斯的《利维坦》发表于 1651 年,在许多方面是现代政治理论的奠基之作。 该书认为,人类是自私的生物,在最初的自然状态下,生活并不是无辜的;相反,它一定是 “孤独、贫穷、下流、野蛮和短暂的” —— 基本上是一种战争状态,每个人都在与其他人战斗。霍布斯主义者会说,只要有任何从这种不良状态中获得的进步,那就主要是由于卢梭所抱怨的那些压制机制:政府、法院、官僚机构、警察。这种观点也已经存在了很长时间了。在英语中,“政治”(Politics)、“礼貌” (Polite)和 “警察”(Police)这些词听起来都是一样的,这是有原因的 —— 它们都来自希腊语中的polis,即城市,拉丁语中的对应词是 civitas,这也给了我们 “文明”(Civility)、“公民”(Civic)和某种现代意义上的 “文明”(Civilization)。
Human society, in this view, is founded on the collective repression of our baser instincts, which becomes all the more necessary when humans are living in large numbers in the same place. The modern-day Hobbesian, then, would argue that, yes, we did live most of our evolutionary history in tiny bands, who could get along mainly because they shared a common interest in the survival of their offspring (‘parental investment’, as evolutionary biologists call it). But even these were in no sense founded on equality. There was always, in this version, some ‘alpha-male’ leader. Hierarchy and domination, and cynical self-interest, have always been the basis of human society. It’s just that, collectively, we have learned it’s to our advantage to prioritize our long-term interests over our short-term instincts; or, better, to create laws that force us to confine our worst impulses to socially useful areas like the economy, while forbidding them everywhere else.
在这种观点中,人类社会是建立在对我们的基本本能的集体压制之上的,当人类大量生活在同一个地方时,这种压制变得更加必要。那么,现代的霍布斯主义者会争辩说,是的,我们在进化史上的大部分时间确实生活在狭小的群体中,他们能够相处,主要是因为他们对后代的生存有共同的兴趣(进化生物学家称之为 “父母投资”)。但即使是这些,在某种意义上也不是建立在平等的基础上。在这个版本中,总是有一些 “阿尔法男性” 的领导者。等级制度和统治,以及玩世不恭的自我利益,一直都是人类社会的基础。只是,我们集体学会了将我们的长期利益置于我们的短期本能之上,这对我们是有利的;或者,最好是制定法律,迫使我们将我们最糟糕的冲动限制在经济等对社会有益的领域,而在其他地方禁止它们。
As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they:
读者可能可以从我们的语气中察觉到,我们不太喜欢在这两种选择中的选择。我们的反对意见可以分为三大类。作为对人类历史一般进程的描述,它们:
1. simply aren’t true;
1. 根本不是真的;
2. have dire political implications;
2. 具有可怕的政治影响;
3. make the past needlessly dull.
3. 让过去的事情变得无谓的沉闷。
This book is an attempt to begin to tell another, more hopeful and more interesting story; one which, at the same time, takes better account of what the last few decades of research have taught us. Partly, this is a matter of bringing together evidence that has accumulated in archaeology, anthropology and kindred disciplines; evidence that points towards a completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years. Almost all of this research goes against the familiar narrative, but too often the most remarkable discoveries remain confined to the work of specialists, or have to be teased out by reading between the lines of scientific publications.
本书试图开始讲述另一个更有希望和更有趣的故事;这个故事同时也更好地考虑到过去几十年的研究给我们的启示。部分原因是将考古学、人类学和同类学科中积累的证据;这些证据指向一个关于人类社会在过去大约 3 万年中如何发展的全新描述。几乎所有这些研究都与人们熟悉的叙述相悖,但最引人注目的发现往往只限于专家的工作,或者不得不通过阅读科学出版物的字里行间来了解。
To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators.
仅仅为了说明新出现的情况有多么不同:现在很清楚,在农耕出现之前,人类社会并不局限于小型的、平等的团体。相反,农业出现之前的狩猎·采集者的世界是一个大胆的社会实验,类似于政治形式的狂欢游行,远比进化论的单调抽象要好。反过来,农业并不意味着私有财产的诞生,也不标志着向不平等迈出了不可逆转的一步。事实上,许多最早的农业社区是相对没有等级和层次的。世界上最早的城市远没有将阶级差异定格在石头上,令人惊讶的是,这些城市的组织结构是非常平等的,不需要专制的统治者、雄心勃勃的战士·政治家,甚至是专横的行政人员。
Information bearing on such issues has been pouring in from every quarter of the globe. As a result, researchers around the world have also been examining ethnographic and historical material in a new light. The pieces now exist to create an entirely different world history – but so far, they remain hidden to all but a few privileged experts (and even the experts tend to hesitate before abandoning their own tiny part of the puzzle, to compare notes with others outside their specific subfield). Our aim in this book is to start putting some of the pieces of the puzzle together, in full awareness that nobody yet has anything like a complete set. The task is immense, and the issues so important, that it will take years of research and debate even to begin to understand the real implications of the picture we’re starting to see. But it’s crucial that we set the process in motion. One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent ‘big picture’ of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that’s now before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift is also required.
与这些问题有关的信息已经从全球各个角落涌入。因此,世界各地的研究人员也在以新的眼光审视人种学和历史材料。现在已经有了创造一个完全不同的世界历史的碎片 —— 但到目前为止,除了少数享有特权的专家之外,他们仍然被隐藏起来(即使是专家,在放弃他们自己的一小部分拼图,与他们特定的子领域之外的其他人进行比较之前,往往会犹豫不决)。我们在这本书中的目的是开始把这个难题的一些碎片拼凑起来,并充分意识到还没有人拥有类似于一套完整的东西。任务是巨大的,问题是如此重要,甚至需要多年的研究和辩论才能开始理解我们开始看到的画面的真正含义。但是,我们启动这一进程是至关重要的。很快就会清楚的一件事是,普遍存在的历史 “大画面” —— 由现代的霍布斯和卢梭的追随者共享 —— 几乎与事实毫无关系。但是,要开始理解现在摆在我们眼前的新信息,仅仅汇编和筛选大量的数据是不够的。还需要一个概念上的转变。
To make that shift means retracing some of the initial steps that led to our modern notion of social evolution: the idea that human societies could be arranged according to stages of development, each with their own characteristic technologies and forms of organization (hunter-gatherers, farmers, urban-industrial society, and so on). As we will see, such notions have their roots in a conservative backlash against critiques of European civilization, which began to gain ground in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The origins of that critique, however, lie not with the philosophers of the Enlightenment (much though they initially admired and imitated it), but with indigenous commentators and observers of European society, such as the Native American (Huron-Wendat) statesman Kandiaronk, of whom we will learn much more in the next chapter.
要实现这一转变,就意味着要追溯导致我们现代社会进化概念的一些最初步骤:认为人类社会可以按照发展阶段来安排,每个阶段都有自己的特色技术和组织形式(狩猎·采集者、农民、城市·工业社会,等等)。正如我们将看到的,这种观念的根源在于保守派对欧洲文明的批评的反弹,这种批评在 18 世纪早期的几十年中开始流行。然而,这种批判的起源并不在于启蒙运动的哲学家(尽管他们最初很崇拜和模仿启蒙运动),而是在于欧洲社会的本土评论家和观察家,例如美洲原住民(Huron-Wendat)政治家 Kandiaronk,我们将在下一章更多地了解他们。
Revisiting what we will call the ‘indigenous critique’ means taking seriously contributions to social thought that come from outside the European canon, and in particular from those indigenous peoples whom Western philosophers tend to cast either in the role of history’s angels or its devils. Both positions preclude any real possibility of intellectual exchange, or even dialogue: it’s just as hard to debate someone who is considered diabolical as someone considered divine, as almost anything they think or say is likely to be deemed either irrelevant or deeply profound. Most of the people we will be considering in this book are long since dead. It is no longer possible to have any sort of conversation with them. We are nonetheless determined to write prehistory as if it consisted of people one would have been able to talk to, when they were still alive – who don’t just exist as paragons, specimens, sock-puppets or playthings of some inexorable law of history.
重新审视我们所说的 “本土批判”,意味着认真对待来自欧洲典籍之外的社会思想的贡献,特别是来自那些西方哲学家倾向于将其置于历史的天使或魔鬼角色的本土人民。这两种立场都排除了智力交流甚至对话的任何真正可能性:与被认为是恶魔的人辩论和与被认为是神的人辩论一样困难,因为他们所想的或所说的几乎都可能被认为是无关紧要或深刻的。我们将在本书中考虑的大多数人都早已去世。现在已经不可能与他们进行任何形式的对话了。不过,我们还是决定把史前史写成由人们能够交谈的人组成,当他们还活着的时候 —— 他们并不只是作为典范、标本、袜子木偶或某种不可抗拒的历史规律的玩物而存在。
There are, certainly, tendencies in history. Some are powerful; currents so strong that they are very difficult to swim against (though there always seem to be some who manage to do it anyway). But the only ‘laws’ are those we make up ourselves. Which brings us on to our second objection.
当然,历史上有一些趋势。有些是强大的;潮流如此强大,以至于很难逆流而上(尽管似乎总有一些人设法做到这一点)。但唯一的 “法律” 是我们自己制定的。这使我们想到了我们的第二个反对意见。
The political implications of the Hobbesian model need little elaboration. It is a foundational assumption of our economic system that humans are at base somewhat nasty and selfish creatures, basing their decisions on cynical, egoistic calculation rather than altruism or co-operation; in which case, the best we can hope for are more sophisticated internal and external controls on our supposedly innate drive towards accumulation and self-aggrandizement. Rousseau’s story about how humankind descended into inequality from an original state of egalitarian innocence seems more optimistic (at least there was somewhere better to fall from), but nowadays it’s mostly deployed to convince us that while the system we live under might be unjust, the most we can realistically aim for is a bit of modest tinkering. The term ‘inequality’ is itself very telling in this regard.
霍布斯模式的政治含义无需赘言。这是我们经济体系的一个基本假设,即人类根本上是有些讨厌和自私的生物,他们的决定是基于愤世嫉俗、利己主义的计算,而不是利他主义或合作;在这种情况下,我们所能希望的是对我们所谓天生的积累和自我膨胀的动力进行更复杂的内部和外部控制。卢梭关于人类如何从最初的平等主义的纯真状态堕入不平等的故事似乎更乐观(至少有更好的地方可供堕落),但如今它主要被用来说服我们,虽然我们生活的系统可能是不公正的,但我们最现实的目标是进行一些小的修补。在这方面,“不平等” 这个词本身就很有说服力。
Since the financial crash of 2008, and the upheavals that followed, the question of inequality – and with it, the long-term history of inequality – have become major topics for debate. Something of a consensus has emerged among intellectuals and even, to some degree, the political classes that levels of social inequality have got out of hand, and that most of the world’s problems result, in one way or another, from an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. Pointing this out is in itself a challenge to global power structures; at the same time, though, it frames the issue in a way that people who benefit from those structures can still find ultimately reassuring, since it implies no meaningful solution to the problem would ever be possible.
自 2008 年的金融风暴和随后的动荡以来,不平等问题 —— 以及随之而来的不平等的长期历史 —— 已经成为辩论的主要议题。在知识分子中,甚至在某种程度上,在政治阶层中,已经出现了某种共识,即社会不平等的程度已经失控,世界上的大多数问题都是由富人和穷人之间不断扩大的鸿沟以这样或那样的方式造成的。指出这一点本身就是对全球权力结构的挑战;但与此同时,它以一种从这些结构中受益的人仍然可以找到最终放心的方式来框定这个问题,因为它暗示着这个问题不可能有任何有意义的解决方案。
After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It’s possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.
毕竟,想象一下,我们以不同的方式来框定这个问题,它可能是 50 年或 100 年前的方式:作为资本的集中,或寡头垄断,或阶级权力。与这些相比,像 “不平等” 这样的词听起来就像它实际上是为了鼓励半途而废和妥协的。可以想象推翻资本主义或打破国家的权力,但不清楚,消除不平等意味着什么。(哪种不平等?财富?机会?人们到底要有多平等,我们才可以说我们已经 “消除了不平等”?)“不平等” 一词是一种适合技术官僚改革者时代的社会问题框架方式,他们从一开始就假设没有真正的社会转型愿景存在。
Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘Can you imagine? The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population own 44 per cent of the world’s wealth!’) – but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree.
关于不平等的辩论使人们可以对数字进行修补,争论基尼系数和功能障碍的阈值,重新调整税收制度或社会福利机制,甚至用显示事情变得多么糟糕的数字来震惊公众(“你能想象吗?世界上最富有的 1% 的人口拥有世界上 44% 的财富!”) —— 但它也允许人们做这一切,而不去解决人们实际上反对这种 “不平等” 社会安排的任何因素:例如,一些人设法将他们的财富变成对其他人的权力;或者其他人最终被告知他们的需求并不重要,他们的生活没有内在价值。最后一种情况,我们应该相信,只是 “不平等” 的必然结果;而 “不平等” 是生活在任何大型、复杂、城市、技术先进的社会中的必然结果。据推测,它将永远伴随着我们。这只是一个程度问题。
Today, there is a veritable boom of thinking about inequality: since 2011, ‘global inequality’ has regularly featured as a top item for debate in the World Economic Forum at Davos. There are inequality indexes, institutes for the study of inequality, and a relentless stream of publications trying to project the current obsession with property distribution back into the Stone Age. There have even been attempts to calculate income levels and Gini coefficients for Palaeolithic mammoth hunters (they both turn out to be very low).1 It’s almost as if we feel some need to come up with mathematical formulae justifying the expression, already popular in the days of Rousseau, that in such societies ‘everyone was equal, because they were all equally poor.’
今天,关于不平等的思考有一个名副其实的热潮:自 2011 年以来,“全球不平等” 经常成为达沃斯世界经济论坛的首要辩论项目。有不平等指数,有研究不平等问题的机构,还有源源不断的出版物,试图将目前对财产分配的痴迷推回到石器时代。甚至还有人试图计算收入水平和旧石器时代猛犸象猎人的基尼系数(结果都很低)。1这几乎就像我们觉得有必要拿出数学公式来证明在卢梭时代已经流行的说法,即在这样的社会中 “人人平等,因为他们都同样贫穷。”
The ultimate effect of all these stories about an original state of innocence and equality, like the use of the term ‘inequality’ itself, is to make wistful pessimism about the human condition seem like common sense: the natural result of viewing ourselves through history’s broad lens. Yes, living in a truly egalitarian society might be possible if you’re a Pygmy or a Kalahari Bushman. But if you want to create a society of true equality today, you’re going to have to figure out a way to go back to becoming tiny bands of foragers again with no significant personal property. Since foragers require a pretty extensive territory to forage in, this would mean having to reduce the world’s population by something like 99.9 per cent. Otherwise, the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces; or, perhaps, to wangle a bit more wiggle room in which some of us can temporarily duck out of its way.
所有这些关于纯真和平等的原始状态的故事的最终效果,就像使用 “不平等” 一词本身一样,是使对人类状况的俏皮的悲观主义看起来像常识:通过历史的广阔镜头来看待我们的自然结果。是的,如果你是俾格米人或卡拉哈里布什曼人,生活在一个真正的平等主义社会可能是可能的。但是,如果你今天想创造一个真正平等的社会,你就必须想办法重新成为没有重要个人财产的小群觅食者。由于觅食者需要相当广泛的领土来觅食,这将意味着必须将世界人口减少大约 99.9%。否则,我们最好的希望就是调整将永远踩在我们脸上的靴子的大小;或者,也许是争取更多的回旋余地,使我们中的一些人能够暂时躲开它。
A first step towards a more accurate, and hopeful, picture of world history might be to abandon the Garden of Eden once and for all, and simply do away with the notion that for hundreds of thousands of years, everyone on earth shared the same idyllic form of social organization. Strangely enough, though, this is often seen as a reactionary move. ‘So are you saying true equality has never been achieved? That it’s therefore impossible?’ It seems to us that such objections are both counterproductive and frankly unrealistic.
要想对世界历史有一个更准确、更有希望的描述,第一步可能是一劳永逸地放弃 “伊甸园”,并简单地摒弃这样的观念:几十万年来,地球上的每个人都共享同样的田园诗般的社会组织形式。但奇怪的是,这常常被看作是一种反动的举动。“那么你是说真正的平等从来没有实现过?因此它是不可能的?” 在我们看来,这种反对意见既适得其反,又坦率地说是不现实的。
First of all, it’s bizarre to imagine that, say, during the roughly 10,000 (some would say more like 20,000) years in which people painted on the walls of Altamira, no one – not only in Altamira, but anywhere on earth – experimented with alternative forms of social organization. What’s the chance of that? Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom? The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together. Of course, to exercise that capacity implies that there should be something meaningful to decide in the first place.
首先,想象一下,比如说在人们在阿尔塔米拉的墙壁上作画的大约一万年(有些人会说更像是两万年)的时间里,没有人 —— 不仅在阿尔塔米拉,而且在地球上的任何地方 —— 尝试过其他形式的社会组织,这是非常奇怪的。这怎么可能呢?其次,实验不同形式的社会组织的能力本身不就是使我们成为人类的一个精髓部分吗?也就是说,具有自我创造能力,甚至自由的生命?正如我们将看到的,人类历史的最终问题不是我们平等地获得物质资源(土地、热量、生产资料),尽管这些东西显然很重要,而是我们在决定如何共同生活方面的平等能力。当然,要行使这种能力意味着首先应该有一些有意义的东西来决定。
If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place. As long ago as 1936, the prehistorian V. Gordon Childe wrote a book called Man Makes Himself . Apart from the sexist language, this is the spirit we wish to invoke. We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?
如果像许多人建议的那样,我们这个物种的未来现在取决于我们创造不同东西的能力(例如,一个财富不能自由转化为权力的系统,或者一些人不会被告知他们的需求不重要,或者他们的生命没有内在价值),那么最终重要的是我们是否能重新发现使我们首先成为人类的自由。早在 1936 年,史前学家 V·戈登·奇尔德写了一本书,名为《人造就自己》。除了性别歧视的语言外,这就是我们希望援引的精神。我们是集体自我创造的项目。如果我们以这种方式对待人类历史呢?如果我们从一开始就把人当作富有想象力的、聪明的、好玩的、值得被理解的生物呢?如果我们不讲一个关于我们的物种如何从某种田园诗般的平等状态中堕落的故事,而是问我们如何被困在如此严格的概念桎梏中,以至于我们甚至无法再想象重塑自我的可能性,那会怎样?
When we first embarked on this book, our intention was to seek new answers to questions about the origins of social inequality. It didn’t take long before we realized this simply wasn’t a very good approach. Framing human history in this way – which necessarily means assuming humanity once existed in an idyllic state, and that a specific point can be identified at which everything started to go wrong – made it almost impossible to ask any of the questions we felt were genuinely interesting. It felt like almost everyone else seemed to be caught in the same trap. Specialists were refusing to generalize. Those few willing to stick their necks out almost invariably reproduced some variation on Rousseau.
当我们第一次着手写这本书时,我们的意图是为有关社会不平等的起源问题寻求新的答案。没过多久,我们就意识到这根本不是一个很好的方法。以这种方式构建人类历史 —— 这必然意味着假设人类曾经存在于田园诗般的状态中,并且可以确定一个特定的点,在这个点上一切都开始出错 —— 使得我们几乎不可能提出任何我们认为真正有趣的问题。感觉上,几乎所有其他人都似乎陷入了同样的陷阱。专家们都拒绝归纳。那些愿意伸出脖子的少数人几乎无一例外地再现了卢梭的一些变种。
Let’s consider a fairly random example of one of these generalist accounts, Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011). Here is Fukuyama on what he feels can be taken as received wisdom about early human societies: ‘In its early stages human political organization is similar to the band-level society observed in higher primates like chimpanzees,’ which Fukuyama suggests can be regarded as ‘a default form of social organization’. He then goes on to assert that Rousseau was largely correct in pointing out that the origin of political inequality lay in the development of agriculture, since hunter-gatherer societies (according to Fukuyama) have no concept of private property, and so little incentive to mark out a piece of land and say, ‘This is mine.’ Band-level societies of this sort, he suggests, are ‘highly egalitarian’.2
让我们考虑一个相当随意的例子,即弗朗西斯·福山的《政治秩序的起源:从前人类时代到法国大革命》(2011),是这些泛泛之谈中的一种。以下是福山对他认为可以被视为关于早期人类社会的公认智慧的看法。在其早期阶段,人类的政治组织类似于在黑猩猩等高等灵长类动物中观察到的族群(band-level society)社会,福山认为这可以被视为 “社会组织的默认形式”。他接着断言,卢梭指出政治不平等的起源在于农业的发展,这在很大程度上是正确的,因为狩猎·采集社会(根据福山的说法)没有私有财产的概念,所以很少有动力去标出一块土地并说:“这是我的”。他认为,这种群体性的社会是 “高度平等的”。2
Jared Diamond, in The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012) suggests that such bands (in which he believes humans still lived ‘as recently as 11,000 years ago’) comprised ‘just a few dozen individuals’, most biologically related. These small groups led a fairly meagre existence, ‘hunting and gathering whatever wild animal and plant species happen to live in an acre of forest’. And their social lives, according to Diamond, were enviably simple. Decisions were reached through ‘face-to-face discussion’; there were ‘few personal possessions’ and ‘no formal political leadership or strong economic specialization’.3 Diamond concludes that, sadly, it is only within such primordial groupings that humans ever achieved a significant degree of social equality.
贾里德·戴蒙德,在《直到昨天的世界:我们能从传统社会学到什么?》(2012)中指出,这样的族群(他认为人类 “在 11,000 年前” 仍然生活在其中)由 “几十个人” 组成,大多数都有生物学上的联系。这些小群体过着相当微薄的生活,“猎取和采集任何刚好生活在一英亩森林中的野生动物和植物物种”。据戴蒙德说,他们的社会生活简单得令人羡慕。决定是通过 “面对面的讨论” 达成的;“个人财产很少”,“没有正式的政治领导或强大的经济专业化”。3戴蒙德的结论是,可悲的是,只有在这样的原始群落中,人类才实现了相当程度的社会平等。
For Diamond and Fukuyama, as for Rousseau some centuries earlier, what put an end to that equality – everywhere and forever – was the invention of agriculture, and the higher population levels it sustained. Agriculture brought about a transition from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’. Accumulation of food surplus fed population growth, leading some ‘tribes’ to develop into ranked societies known as ‘chiefdoms’. Fukuyama paints an almost explicitly biblical picture of this process, a departure from Eden: ‘As little bands of human beings migrated and adapted to different environments, they began their exit out of the state of nature by developing new social institutions.’4 They fought wars over resources. Gangly and pubescent, these societies were clearly heading for trouble.
对于戴蒙德和福山来说,就像几个世纪前的卢梭一样,结束这种平等的是农业的发明,以及它所维持的更高的人口水平。农业带来了从 “族群” 到 “部落” 的过渡。粮食盈余的积累促进了人口增长,导致一些 “部落” 发展成被称为 “酋长国” 的等级社会。福山对这一过程描绘了一幅几乎明确的圣经画面,即离开伊甸园的过程:“随着人类的小群迁移并适应不同的环境,他们开始通过发展新的社会制度来退出自然状态。4他们为争夺资源而打仗。他们为争夺资源而发生战争,这些社会显然是在走向麻烦。
It was time to grow up and appoint some proper leadership. Hierarchies began to emerge. There was no point in resisting, since hierarchy – according to Diamond and Fukuyama – is inevitable once humans adopt large, complex forms of organization. Even when the new leaders began acting badly – creaming off agricultural surplus to promote their flunkies and relatives, making status permanent and hereditary, collecting trophy skulls and harems of slave-girls, or tearing out rivals’ hearts with obsidian knives – there could be no going back. Before long, chiefs had managed to convince others they should be referred to as ‘kings’, even ‘emperors’. As Diamond patiently explains to us:
是时候长大了,任命一些适当的领导。等级制度开始出现了。抵抗是没有意义的,因为根据戴蒙德和福山的观点,一旦人类采用大型复杂的组织形式,等级制度是不可避免的。即使新的领导人开始表现得很糟糕 —— 榨取农业盈余来提升他们的走狗和亲戚,使地位永久化和世袭化,收集战利品的头骨和女奴的后宫,或者用黑曜石刀挖出对手的心脏 —— 也无法回头了。 不久之后,酋长们已经设法说服其他人,他们应该被称为 “国王”,甚至是 “皇帝”。正如戴蒙德耐心地向我们解释的那样。
Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic: you’ll have to find some tiny band or tribe willing to accept you, where no one is a stranger, and where kings, presidents, and bureaucrats are unnecessary.5
如果没有做出决定的领导人,没有执行决定的行政人员,没有管理决定和法律的官僚,庞大的人口就无法运作。唉,对于你们这些无政府主义者和梦想在没有任何国家政府的情况下生活的读者来说,这些就是你们的梦想不现实的原因:你们必须找到一些愿意接受你们的小团体或部落,在那里没有人是陌生人,而国王、总统和官僚是不必要的。5
A dismal conclusion, not just for anarchists but for anybody who ever wondered if there might be a viable alternative to the current status quo. Still, the truly remarkable thing is that, despite the self-assured tone, such pronouncements are not actually based on any kind of scientific evidence. As we will soon be discovering, there is simply no reason to believe that small-scale groups are especially likely to be egalitarian – or, conversely, that large ones must necessarily have kings, presidents or even bureaucracies. Statements like these are just so many prejudices dressed up as facts, or even as laws of history.6
一个令人沮丧的结论,不仅对无政府主义者,而且对任何曾经想知道是否可能有一个可行的替代当前现状的人。然而,真正了不起的是,尽管语气自负,但这种声明实际上并没有任何科学证据。我们很快就会发现,根本没有理由相信小规模的群体特别可能是平等主义的 —— 或者反过来说,大的群体必须有国王、总统甚至官僚机构。像这样的声明只是许多偏见被装扮成事实,甚至是历史的规律。6
As we say, it’s all just an endless repetition of a story first told by Rousseau in 1754. Many contemporary scholars will quite literally say that Rousseau’s vision has been proved correct. If so, it is an extraordinary coincidence, since Rousseau himself never suggested that the innocent State of Nature really happened. On the contrary, he insisted he was engaging in a thought experiment: ‘One must not take the kind of research which we enter into as the pursuit of truths of history, but solely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better fitted to clarify the nature of things than to expose their actual origin…’7
正如我们所说,这一切只是卢梭在 1754 年首次讲述的故事的无尽重复。许多当代学者会很认真地说,卢梭的设想已经被证明是正确的。如果是这样,那就是一个非同寻常的巧合,因为卢梭本人从未暗示过无辜的自然状态真的发生过。相反,他坚持认为自己是在进行思想实验:“我们不能把我们所从事的那种研究看作是对历史真理的追求,而只能看作是假设性和条件性的推理,它更适合于澄清事物的本质,而不是揭露它们的实际来源……” 7
Rousseau’s portrayal of the State of Nature and how it was overturned by the coming of agriculture was never intended to form the basis for a series of evolutionary stages, like the ones Scottish philosophers such as Smith, Ferguson or Millar (and later on, Lewis Henry Morgan) were referring to when they spoke of ‘Savagery’ and ‘Barbarism’. In no sense was Rousseau imagining these different states of being as levels of social and moral development, corresponding to historical changes in modes of production: foraging, pastoralism, farming, industry. Rather, what Rousseau presented was more of a parable, by way of an attempt to explore a fundamental paradox of human politics: how is it that our innate drive for freedom somehow leads us, time and again, on a ‘spontaneous march to inequality’?8
卢梭对自然状态的描述以及它如何被农业的到来所颠覆,绝不是为了形成一系列进化阶段的基础,就像苏格兰哲学家如斯密、弗格森或米勒(以及后来的刘易斯·亨利· 摩根)在谈到 “野蛮”(Savagery)和 “未开化”(Barbarism)时所说的那样。在任何意义上,卢梭都没有把这些不同的存在状态想象成社会和道德发展的水平,与生产方式的历史变化相对应:觅食、放牧、耕种、工业。相反,卢梭提出的更像是一个寓言,试图探索人类政治的一个基本悖论:为什么我们与生俱来的自由动力会一次又一次地将我们引向 “自发的不平等”?8
Describing how the invention of farming first leads to private property, and property to the need for civil government to protect it, this is how Rousseau puts things: ‘All ran towards their chains, believing that they were securing their liberty; for although they had reason enough to discern the advantages of a civil order, they did not have experience enough to foresee the dangers.’9 His imaginary State of Nature was primarily invoked as a way of illustrating the point. True, he didn’t invent the concept: as a rhetorical device, the State of Nature had already been used in European philosophy for a century. Widely deployed by natural law theorists, it effectively allowed every thinker interested in the origins of government (Locke, Grotius and so on) to play God, each coming up with his own variant on humanity’s original condition, as a springboard for speculation.
卢梭在描述农业的发明如何首先导致私有财产,而财产又如何导致需要公民政府来保护它时,是这样说的:“所有人都奔向他们的锁链,认为他们在确保自己的自由;因为尽管他们有足够的理由来发现公民秩序的好处,但他们却没有足够的经验来预见危险性。”9他想象中的自然国主要是作为说明问题的一种方式而被引用的。的确,他没有发明这个概念:作为一种修辞手段,自然国在欧洲哲学中已经使用了一个世纪。它被自然法理论家广泛使用,有效地让每个对政府起源感兴趣的思想家(洛克、格劳秀斯等)扮演上帝,每个人都对人类的原始状况提出自己的变体,作为猜测的跳板。
Hobbes was doing much the same thing when he wrote in Leviathan that the primordial state of human society would necessarily have been a ‘Bellum omnium contra omnes ’, a war of all against all, which could only be overcome by the creation of an absolute sovereign power. He wasn’t saying there had actually been a time when everyone lived in such a primordial state. Some suspect that Hobbes’s state of war was really an allegory for his native England’s descent into civil war in the mid seventeenth century, which drove the royalist author into exile in Paris. Whatever the case, the closest Hobbes himself came to suggesting this state really existed was when he noted how the only people who weren’t under the ultimate authority of some king were the kings themselves, and they always seemed to be at war with one another.
当霍布斯在《利维坦》中写道,人类社会的原始状态必然是 “Bellum omnium contra omnes”,即所有人对所有人的战争,只有建立一个绝对的主权国家才能克服。他并不是说曾有过这样一个时代,每个人都生活在这样一个原始状态中。有些人怀疑霍布斯的战争状态实际上是对他的祖国英格兰在 17 世纪中期陷入内战的一种寓言,这使得这位保皇党作家流亡到巴黎。无论怎样,霍布斯本人最接近暗示这种状态真的存在的时候,他注意到唯一不在某个国王的最终权威之下的人是国王自己,而且他们似乎总是在互相争斗。
Despite all this, many modern writers treat Leviathan in the same way others treat Rousseau’s Discourse – as if it were laying the groundwork for an evolutionary study of history; and although the two have completely different starting points, the result is rather similar.10
尽管如此,许多现代作家对待《利维坦》的方式与其他人对待卢梭《不平等论》的方式相同 —— 仿佛它为历史的进化研究奠定了基础;尽管,两者的出发点完全不同,但结果却相当相似。10
‘When it came to violence in pre-state peoples,’ writes the psychologist Steven Pinker, ‘Hobbes and Rousseau were talking through their hats: neither knew a thing about life before civilization.’ On this point, Pinker is absolutely right. In the same breath, however, he also asks us to believe that Hobbes, writing in 1651 (apparently through his hat), somehow managed to guess right, and come up with an analysis of violence and its causes in human history that is ‘as good as any today’.11 This would be an astonishing – not to mention damning – verdict on centuries of empirical research, if it only happened to be true. As we’ll see, it is not even close.12
心理学家史蒂芬·平克写道:“当谈到前国家民族的暴力时,“霍布斯和卢梭是在用他们的帽子说话(不懂装懂):他们对文明之前的生活都一无所知。” 在这一点上,平克是完全正确的。然而,在同一时刻,他还要求我们相信,霍布斯在 1651 年写作时(显然是通过他的帽子),以某种方式设法猜对了,并对人类历史上的暴力及其原因进行了分析,“与今天的任何分析一个水平”。11这将是对几个世纪以来实证研究的一个惊人的 —— 更不用说破坏性的 —— 裁决,如果它刚好是真的。正如我们将看到的那样,它甚至没有接近。12
We can take Pinker as our quintessential modern Hobbesian. In his magnum opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2012), and subsequent books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) he argues that today we live in a world which is, overall, far less violent and cruel than anything our ancestors had ever experienced.13
我们可以把平克当作我们典型的现代霍布斯主义者。在他的巨著《我们天性中更好的天使:为什么暴力会减少》(2012 年)中,以及随后的书籍,如《现在启蒙:理性、科学、人文主义和进步的理由》(2018 年)中,他认为今天我们生活的世界,总体上比我们的祖先所经历的任何事情都要少很多暴力和残酷。13
Now, this may seem counter-intuitive to anyone who spends much time watching the news, let alone who knows much about the history of the twentieth century. Pinker, though, is confident that an objective statistical analysis, shorn of sentiment, will show us to be living in an age of unprecedented peace and security. And this, he suggests, is the logical outcome of living in sovereign states, each with a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its borders, as opposed to the ‘anarchic societies’ (as he calls them) of our deep evolutionary past, where life for most people was, indeed, typically ‘nasty, brutish, and short’.
现在,对于任何花很多时间看新闻的人来说,这似乎是反直觉的,更不用说对二十世纪的历史有多少了解的人。不过,平克相信,剔除了情绪的客观统计分析将显示我们生活在一个前所未有的和平与安全的时代。他认为,这是生活在主权国家的逻辑结果,每个国家都垄断了在其境内合法使用暴力的权利,而不是我们进化史上的 “无政府社会”(如他所说),在那里,大多数人的生活确实是典型的 “肮脏、野蛮和短暂”。
Since, like Hobbes, Pinker is concerned with the origins of the state, his key point of transition is not the rise of farming but the emergence of cities. ‘Archaeologists’, he writes, ‘tell us that humans lived in a state of anarchy until the emergence of civilization some five thousand years ago, when sedentary farmers first coalesced into cities and states and developed the first governments.’14 What follows is, to put it bluntly, a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along. You might hope that a passionate advocate of science would approach the topic scientifically, through a broad appraisal of the evidence – but this is precisely the approach to human prehistory that Pinker seems to find uninteresting. Instead he relies on anecdotes, images and individual sensational discoveries, like the headline-making find, in 1991, of ‘Ötzi the Tyrolean Iceman’.
由于像霍布斯一样,平克关注的是国家的起源,他的关键过渡点不是农业的兴起,而是城市的出现。他写道,“考古学家” 告诉我们,人类一直生活在无政府状态中,直到大约五千年前文明的出现,那时定居的农民第一次凝聚成城市和国家,并发展出第一个政府。14接下来的内容,直截了当地说,是一个现代心理学家边做边说的。你可能希望一个热衷于科学的倡导者会通过对证据的广泛评估来科学地处理这个话题 —— 但,这正是平克似乎认为无趣的人类史前史的方法。相反,他依靠的是轶事、图像和个别轰动性的发现,比如 1991 年 “蒂罗尔冰人厄兹” 的头条发现。
‘What is it about the ancients,’ Pinker asks at one point, ‘that they couldn’t leave us an interesting corpse without resorting to foul play?’ There is an obvious response to this: doesn’t it rather depend on which corpse you consider interesting in the first place? Yes, a little over 5,000 years ago someone walking through the Alps left the world of the living with an arrow in his side; but there’s no particular reason to treat Ötzi as a poster child for humanity in its original condition, other than, perhaps, Ötzi suiting Pinker’s argument. But if all we’re doing is cherry-picking, we could just as easily have chosen the much earlier burial known to archaeologists as Romito 2 (after the Calabrian rock-shelter where it was found). Let’s take a moment to consider what it would mean if we did this.
平克有一次问道:“古人是怎么了,他们不能在不诉诸于犯规的情况下给我们留下一具有趣的尸体?” 对此有一个明显的回应:这难道不取决于你认为哪一具尸体首先是有趣的吗?是的,5000 多年前,有人在阿尔卑斯山上走过,身中一箭,离开了人世;但没有特别的理由把厄齐当作人类原始状态的海报,除了,也许,厄齐适合平克的论点之外。但是,如果我们所做的只是偷梁换柱,我们也可以很容易地选择更早的墓葬,考古学家称之为 “罗米托 2 号”(Romito 2,以发现它的卡拉布里亚岩棚为名)。让我们花点时间考虑一下如果我们这样做会意味着什么。
Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial.15
罗米托 2 号是一万年前的男性墓葬,他患有一种罕见的遗传性疾病(尖锐湿疣):一种严重的侏儒症,这在生活中会使他在他的社区中变得不正常,无法参与那种高海拔的狩猎活动,而这正是他们生存的必要条件。对他的病理研究表明,尽管健康和营养水平普遍较差,但同一社区的狩猎采集者仍然不遗余力地支持这个人度过婴儿期并进入成年早期,给予他与其他人相同的肉类份额,并最终为他进行了精心的、有保护的埋葬。15
Neither is Romito 2 an isolated case. When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Palaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (and beyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish).16 If we did want to reach a general conclusion about what form human societies originally took, based on statistical frequencies of health indicators from ancient burials, we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker): in origin, it might be claimed, our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short.
罗米托 2 号也不是一个孤立的案例。当考古学家对旧石器时代的狩猎采集者墓葬进行平衡评估时,他们发现与健康有关的残疾频率很高 —— 但也有令人惊讶的高水平护理,直到死亡(甚至更久,因为其中一些葬礼是非常奢侈的)。16如果我们真的想根据古代墓葬中健康指标的统计频率得出关于人类社会最初采取什么形式的一般结论,我们将不得不得出与霍布斯(和平克)完全相反的结论:可以说,在起源上,我们的物种是一个养育和照顾的物种,根本没有必要让生命变得肮脏、野蛮或短暂。
We’re not suggesting we actually do this. As we’ll see, there is reason to believe that during the Palaeolithic, only rather unusual individuals were buried at all. We just want to point out how easy it would be to play the same game in the other direction – easy, but frankly not too enlightening.17 As we get to grips with the actual evidence, we always find that the realities of early human social life were far more complex, and a good deal more interesting, than any modern-day State of Nature theorist would ever be likely to guess.
我们并不建议我们真的这样做。正如我们将看到的,有理由相信在旧石器时代,只有相当不寻常的人被埋葬。我们只是想指出,从另一个方向玩同样的游戏是多么容易 —— 但坦率地说没有太多启发性。17随着我们对实际证据的掌握,我们总是发现,早期人类社会生活的现实要比任何现代自然状态理论家可能猜到的要复杂得多,也有趣得多。
When it comes to cherry-picking anthropological case studies, and putting them forward as representative of our ‘contemporary ancestors’ – that is, as models for what humans might have been like in a State of Nature – those working in the tradition of Rousseau tend to prefer African foragers like the Hadza, Pygmies or!Kung. Those who follow Hobbes prefer the Yanomami.
当谈到挑选人类学案例研究,并把它们作为我们 “当代祖先” 的代表 —— 也就是说,作为人类在自然状态下可能是什么样子的模型 —— 那些按照卢梭的传统工作的人往往更喜欢非洲的哈扎人、俾格米人或孔人等觅食者。那些追随霍布斯的人更喜欢雅诺马米人。
The Yanomami are an indigenous population who live largely by growing plantains and cassava in the Amazon rainforest, their traditional homeland, on the border of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil. Since the 1970s, the Yanomami have acquired a reputation as the quintessential violent savages: ‘fierce people’, as their most famous ethnographer, Napoleon Chagnon, called them. This seems decidedly unfair to the Yanomami since, in fact, statistics show they’re not particularly violent – compared with other Amerindian groups, Yanomami homicide rates turn out average-to-low.18 Again, though, actual statistics turn out to matter less than the availability of dramatic images and anecdotes. The real reason the Yanomami are so famous, and have such a colourful reputation, has everything to do with Chagnon himself: his 1968 book Yanomamö: The Fierce People, which sold millions of copies, and also a series of films, such as The Ax Fight, which offered viewers a vivid glimpse of tribal warfare. For a while all this made Chagnon the world’s most famous anthropologist, in the process turning the Yanomami into a notorious case study of primitive violence and establishing their scientific importance in the emerging field of sociobiology.
亚诺马米人是一个原住民,他们主要靠在亚马逊雨林中种植大蕉和木薯为生,亚马逊雨林是他们的传统家园,位于委内瑞拉南部和巴西北部的边界。自 20 世纪 70 年代以来,亚诺马米人已经获得了典型的暴力野蛮人的声誉。正如他们最著名的民族学家拿破仑·查尼翁所说,他们是 “凶猛的人”。这似乎对亚诺玛米人很不公平,因为事实上,统计数据显示他们并不特别暴力 —— 与其他美洲印第安人群体相比,亚诺玛米人的凶杀率一般到较低。18不过,实际的统计数字还是不如戏剧性的图像和轶事来得重要。亚诺玛米人之所以如此出名,并拥有如此丰富多彩的声誉,与查尼翁本人有很大关系:他在 1968 年出版的《亚诺玛默:凶猛的民族》一书售出了数百万册,还有一系列电影,如《斧头大战》,让观众生动地看到了部落战争。一时间,所有这些都使查尼翁成为世界上最著名的人类学家,在这个过程中,亚诺玛米人成为一个臭名昭著的原始暴力案例,并在新兴的社会生物学领域确立了他们的科学重要性。
We should be fair to Chagnon (not everyone is). He never claimed the Yanomami should be treated as living remnants of the Stone Age; indeed, he often noted that they obviously weren’t. At the same time, and somewhat unusually for an anthropologist, he tended to define them primarily in terms of things they lacked (e.g. written language, a police force, a formal judiciary), as opposed to the positive features of their culture, which has rather the same effect of setting them up as quintessential primitives.19 Chagnon’s central argument was that adult Yanomami men achieve both cultural and reproductive advantages by killing other adult men; and that this feedback between violence and biological fitness – if generally representative of the early human condition – might have had evolutionary consequences for our species as a whole.20
我们应该对查尼翁公平一点(不是每个人都这样)。他从未声称亚诺玛米人应被视为石器时代的活体残余;事实上,他经常指出,他们显然不是。同时,对于一个人类学家来说不太常见,他倾向于主要从他们缺乏的东西(如书面语言、警察部队、正式的司法机构)来定义他们,而不是从他们文化的积极特征来定义他们,这反而会使他们被设定为典型的原始人。19查尼翁的中心论点是,雅诺马米族的成年男子通过杀害其他成年男子来实现文化和生殖优势;这种暴力和生物健康之间的反馈 —— 如果普遍代表早期人类的状况 —— 可能对我们整个物种的进化产生影响。20
This is not just a big ‘if’ – it’s enormous. Other anthropologists started raining down questions, not always friendly.21 Allegations of professional misconduct were levelled at Chagnon (mostly revolving around ethical standards in the field), and everyone took sides. Some of these accusations appear baseless, but the rhetoric of Chagnon’s defenders grew so heated that (as another celebrated anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, put it) not only was he held up as the epitome of rigorous, scientific anthropology, but all who questioned him or his social Darwinism were excoriated as ‘Marxists’, ‘liars’, ‘cultural anthropologists from the academic left’, ‘ayatollahs’ and ‘politically correct bleeding hearts’. To this day, there is no easier way to get anthropologists to begin denouncing each other as extremists than to mention the name of Napoleon Chagnon.22
这不仅仅是一个大的 “如果” —— 它是巨大的。其他人类学家开始雨后春笋般地提出问题,并不总是友好的。21对查尼翁的专业不当行为的指控(主要是围绕着该领域的道德标准),每个人都站在了一边。其中一些指控似乎毫无根据,但查尼翁的辩护人的言辞越来越激烈,以至于(正如另一位著名的人类学家克利福德·格尔茨所说)他不仅被捧为严谨、科学的人类学的缩影,而且所有质疑他或他的社会达尔文主义的人都被斥为 “马克思主义者”、“骗子”、“学术左派的文化人类学家”、“阿亚托拉” 和 “政治正确的吸血者”。时至今日,没有比提到拿破仑·查尼翁的名字更容易让人类学家开始互相指责为极端分子的了。22
The important point here is that, as a ‘non-state’ people, the Yanomami are supposed to exemplify what Pinker calls the ‘Hobbesian trap’, whereby individuals in tribal societies find themselves caught in repetitive cycles of raiding and warfare, living fraught and precarious lives, always just a few steps away from violent death on the tip of a sharp weapon or at the end of a vengeful club. That, Pinker tells us, is the kind of dismal fate ordained for us by evolution. We have only escaped it by virtue of our willingness to place ourselves under the common protection of nation states, courts of law and police forces; and also by embracing virtues of reasoned debate and self-control that Pinker sees as the exclusive heritage of a European ‘civilizing process’, which produced the Age of Enlightenment (in other words, were it not for Voltaire, and the police, the knife-fight over Chagnon’s findings would have been physical, not just academic).
这里重要的一点是,作为一个 “非国家” 的民族,亚诺玛米人应该是平克所说的 “霍布斯陷阱” 的典范,即部落社会中的个人发现自己陷入了重复的突袭和战争的循环中,过着充满危险的生活,总是离暴力死亡只有几步之遥,就在锋利的武器尖端或复仇的棒子末端。平克告诉我们,这就是进化论为我们规定的那种可怕的命运。我们只是由于愿意将自己置于民族国家、法院和警察部队的共同保护之下而逃脱了这一命运;同时也由于接受了理性辩论和自我控制的美德,平克认为这是欧洲 “文明进程” 的独家遗产,它产生了启蒙时代(换句话说,如果没有伏尔泰和警察,为查尼翁的发现而进行的刀战将是肉体的,而不仅仅是学术的。)
There are many problems with this argument. We’ll start with the most obvious. The idea that our current ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are somehow products of the ‘Western tradition’ would in fact have come as an enormous surprise to someone like Voltaire. As we’ll soon see, the Enlightenment thinkers who propounded such ideals almost invariably put them in the mouths of foreigners, even ‘savages’ like the Yanomami. This is hardly surprising, since it’s almost impossible to find a single author in that Western tradition, from Plato to Marcus Aurelius to Erasmus, who did not make it clear that they would have been opposed to such ideas. The word ‘democracy’ might have been invented in Europe (barely, since Greece at the time was much closer culturally to North Africa and the Middle East than it was to, say, England), but it’s almost impossible to find a single European author before the nineteenth century who suggested it would be anything other than a terrible form of government.23
这种说法有很多问题。我们从最明显的问题开始。我们目前的自由、平等和民主的理想是 “西方传统” 的产物,这种想法对于像伏尔泰这样的人来说,实际上是一个巨大的惊喜。我们很快就会看到,提出这些理想的启蒙思想家几乎总是把它们放在外国人的嘴里,甚至像雅诺马米人这样的 “野蛮人” 的嘴里。这并不奇怪,因为在西方传统中,从柏拉图到马库斯·奥勒留再到伊拉斯谟,几乎不可能找到一个没有明确表示他们会反对这种想法的作者。“民主” 这个词可能是在欧洲发明的(勉强说来,因为当时的希腊在文化上比英国更接近北非和中东),但几乎不可能找到一个在 19 世纪之前的欧洲作家认为它是一种可怕的政府形式之外的东西。23
For obvious reasons, Hobbes’s position tends to be favoured by those on the right of the political spectrum, and Rousseau’s by those leaning left. Pinker positions himself as a rational centrist, condemning what he considers to be the extremists on either side. But why then insist that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as ‘the white race’ (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, ‘Western civilization’)? There is simply no reason to make this move. It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things that can be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality, deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, and only then tell the story of how they coalesced into the current global system.24
由于显而易见的原因,霍布斯的立场往往受到政治光谱右派的青睐,而卢梭的立场则受到左派的青睐。平克将自己定位为一个理性的中间派,谴责他认为是两边的极端分子。但是,为什么又坚持认为二十世纪之前所有重要的人类进步形式都只能归功于那个曾经自称为 “白人”(现在一般都用更公认的同义词 “西方文明” 称呼自己)的人类群体?根本没有理由采取这种做法。确定那些可以被解释为全世界理性主义、法制、审议式民主等的最初萌芽的东西,然后再讲述它们如何凝聚成当前的全球体系,也同样容易(实际上相当容易)。24
Insisting, to the contrary, that all good things come only from Europe ensures one’s work can be read as a retroactive apology for genocide, since (apparently, for Pinker) the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations – visited on the rest of the world by European powers – is just another example of humans comporting themselves as they always had; it was in no sense unusual. What was really significant, so this argument goes, is that it made possible the dissemination of what he takes to be ‘purely’ European notions of freedom, equality before the law, and human rights to the survivors.
相反,坚持认为所有的好东西都只来自欧洲,可以确保自己的作品被解读为对种族灭绝的追溯性道歉,因为(显然,对平克来说)欧洲大国对整个文明的奴役、强奸、大规模谋杀和破坏,只是人类一如既往地自律的另一个例子;这在某种意义上并不罕见。这种说法认为,真正重要的是,它使他所认为的自由、法律面前人人平等和人权的 “纯” 欧洲概念得以传播给幸存者。
Whatever the unpleasantness of the past, Pinker assures us, there is every reason to be optimistic, indeed happy, about the overall path our species has taken. True, he does concede there is scope for some serious tinkering in areas like poverty reduction, income inequality or indeed peace and security; but on balance – and relative to the number of people living on earth today – what we have now is a spectacular improvement on anything our species accomplished in its history so far (unless you’re Black, or live in Syria, for example). Modern life is, for Pinker, in almost every way superior to what came before; and here he does produce elaborate statistics which purport to show how every day in every way – health, security, education, comfort, and by almost any other conceivable parameter – everything is actually getting better and better.
平克向我们保证,无论过去有什么不愉快,我们都有理由对我们人类所走的总体道路感到乐观,甚至是高兴。诚然,他承认,在减少贫困、收入不平等或者和平与安全等领域,还有一些认真修补的余地;但总的来说 —— 相对于今天生活在地球上的人数,我们现在所拥有的一切,比我们人类历史上迄今为止所完成的任何事情都有了惊人的进步(除非你是黑人,或者生活在叙利亚,比如说)。在平克看来,现代生活几乎在每一个方面都比以前的生活要好;在这里,他确实提供了详细的统计数据,旨在表明每天在每一个方面 —— 健康、安全、教育、舒适,以及几乎任何其他可以想象的参数 —— 一切实际上都在变得越来越好。
It’s hard to argue with the numbers, but as any statistician will tell you, statistics are only as good as the premises on which they are based. Has ‘Western civilization’ really made life better for everyone? This ultimately comes down to the question of how to measure human happiness, which is a notoriously difficult thing to do. About the only dependable way anyone has ever discovered to determine whether one way of living is really more satisfying, fulfilling, happy or otherwise preferable to any other is to allow people to fully experience both, give them a choice, then watch what they actually do. For instance, if Pinker is correct, then any sane person who had to choose between (a) the violent chaos and abject poverty of the ‘tribal’ stage in human development and (b) the relative security and prosperity of Western civilization would not hesitate to leap for safety.25
对这些数字很难争辩,但正如任何统计学家会告诉你的那样,统计数字只有在它们所依据的前提下才是好的。西方文明 “真的让每个人的生活变得更好了吗?” 这最终归结为如何衡量人类幸福的问题,这是一个众所周知的困难的事情。人们所发现的确定一种生活方式是否真的比其他方式更令人满意、更充实、更快乐或更可取的唯一可靠方法是让人们充分体验这两种方式,给他们一个选择,然后观察他们实际做了什么。例如,如果平克是正确的,那么任何理智的人如果必须在(a)人类发展的 “部落” 阶段的暴力混乱和赤贫与(b)西方文明的相对安全和繁荣之间做出选择,都会毫不犹豫地跳到安全地带。25
But empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker’s conclusions.
但这里有经验数据,它表明平克的结论有很大问题。
Over the last several centuries, there have been numerous occasions when individuals found themselves in a position to make precisely this choice – and they almost never go the way Pinker would have predicted. Some have left us clear, rational explanations for why they made the choices they did. Let us consider the case of Helena Valero, a Brazilian woman born into a family of Spanish descent, whom Pinker mentions as a ‘white girl’ abducted by Yanomami in 1932 while travelling with her parents along the remote Rio Dimití.
在过去的几个世纪里,有无数次个人发现自己恰恰可以做出这样的选择 —— 而他们几乎从未按照平克预测的方式发展。有些人给我们留下了清晰、合理的解释,说明他们为什么做出这样的选择。让我们考虑一下海伦娜·瓦莱罗(Helena Valero)的案例,她是一个出生在西班牙家庭的巴西妇女,平克提到她是一个 “白人女孩”,在 1932 年与她的父母沿着遥远的迪米提河旅行时被亚诺马米人绑架了。
For two decades, Valero lived with a series of Yanomami families, marrying twice, and eventually achieving a position of some importance in her community. Pinker briefly cites the account Valero later gave of her own life, where she describes the brutality of a Yanomami raid.26 What he neglects to mention is that in 1956 she abandoned the Yanomami to seek her natal family and live again in ‘Western civilization,’ only to find herself in a state of occasional hunger and constant dejection and loneliness. After a while, given the ability to make a fully informed decision, Helena Valero decided she preferred life among the Yanomami, and returned to live with them.27
二十年来,瓦莱罗与一系列亚诺马米人家庭生活在一起,两次结婚,并最终在她的社区获得了一些重要的地位。平克简要地引用了瓦莱罗后来对自己生活的描述,她在那里描述了亚诺马米人突袭的残暴行为。26他忽略了的是,1956 年,她放弃了亚诺马米人,去寻找她的娘家,重新生活在 “西方文明” 中,却发现自己处于一种偶尔的饥饿和持续的沮丧和孤独中。过了一段时间,在有能力做出充分知情决定的情况下,海伦娜·瓦莱罗决定她更喜欢亚诺马米人的生活,并回到他们身边生活。27
Her story is by no means unusual. The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter.28 This even applied to abducted children. Confronted again with their biological parents, most would run back to their adoptive kin for protection.29 By contrast, Amerindians incorporated into European society by adoption or marriage, including those who – unlike the unfortunate Helena Valero – enjoyed considerable wealth and schooling, almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity, or – having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed – returning to indigenous society to live out their last days.
她的故事绝非罕见。南北美洲的殖民历史充满了这样的描述:定居者被土著社会俘虏或收养后,可以选择他们希望留在哪里,但几乎无一例外地选择留在后者那里。28这甚至适用于被绑架的儿童。当他们再次面对自己的亲生父母时,大多数人都会跑回收养他们的亲戚那里寻求保护。29相比之下,通过收养或婚姻融入欧洲社会的美洲印第安人,包括那些 —— 与不幸的海伦娜·瓦莱罗不同 —— 享有大量财富和学校教育的人,几乎无一例外地采取了相反的做法:要么尽早逃离,要么 —— 在尽力适应但最终失败后 —— 回到土著社会,度过最后的日子。
Among the most eloquent commentaries on this whole phenomenon is to be found in a private letter written by Benjamin Franklin to a friend:
本杰明·富兰克林写给一位朋友的私人信件中,可以看到对这整个现象的最雄辩的评论。
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. One instance I remember to have heard, where the person was to be brought home to possess a good Estate; but finding some care necessary to keep it together, he relinquished it to a younger brother, reserving to himself nothing but a gun and match-Coat, with which he took his way again to the Wilderness.30
当一个印第安人的孩子在我们中间长大,学会了我们的语言,习惯了我们的习俗,但如果他去看他的亲戚,和他们一起做一次印第安人的漫游,就无法劝说他再回来。并在他们中间生活了一段时间,尽管他们的朋友将其赎回,并以一切可以想象的温柔对待他们,说服他们留在英国人中间,但在很短的时间内,他们对我们的生活方式以及支持这种生活方式所需的照顾和痛苦感到厌恶,并利用第一个机会再次逃到森林中,从那里就无法再找到他们。我记得曾听说过这样一个例子:一个人被带回家,拥有一笔很好的财产;但他发现需要一些照顾它维持它,就把它交给了一个弟弟,只给自己保留了一把枪和一件火柴大衣,带着它又去了荒野。30
Many who found themselves embroiled in such contests of civilization, if we may call them that, were able to offer clear reasons for their decisions to stay with their erstwhile captors. Some emphasized the virtues of freedom they found in Native American societies, including sexual freedom, but also freedom from the expectation of constant toil in pursuit of land and wealth.31 Others noted the ‘Indian’s’ reluctance ever to let anyone fall into a condition of poverty, hunger or destitution. It was not so much that they feared poverty themselves, but rather that they found life infinitely more pleasant in a society where no one else was in a position of abject misery (perhaps much as Oscar Wilde declared he was an advocate of socialism because he didn’t like having to look at poor people or listen to their stories). For anyone who has grown up in a city full of rough sleepers and panhandlers – and that is, unfortunately, most of us – it is always a bit startling to discover there’s nothing inevitable about any of this.
许多发现自己卷入这种文明竞赛的人,如果我们可以这么说的话,都能为他们决定留在以前的俘虏身边提供明确的理由。一些人强调了他们在美洲原住民社会中发现的自由的优点,包括性自由,但也有免于为追求土地和财富而不断劳作的期望的自由。31其他人则指出,“印第安人” 不愿意让任何人陷入贫穷、饥饿或贫困的境地。这并不是说他们自己害怕贫穷,而是他们发现在一个没有其他人处于赤贫地位的社会中,生活会无限地愉快(也许就像奥斯卡·王尔德宣称他是社会主义的倡导者,因为他不喜欢看穷人或听他们的故事)。对于任何在充满露宿者和乞丐的城市中长大的人 —— 不幸的是,这就是我们大多数人 —— 发现这一切没有什么不可避免的时候,总是有点惊愕。
Still others noted the ease with which outsiders, taken in by ‘Indian’ families, might achieve acceptance and prominent positions in their adoptive communities, becoming members of chiefly households, or even chiefs themselves.32 Western propagandists speak endlessly about equality of opportunity; these seem to have been societies where it actually existed. By far the most common reasons, however, had to do with the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities: qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings. ‘Security’ takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.
还有一些人注意到,被 “印第安人” 家庭收留的外来者很容易在其收养的社区中获得认可和重要地位,成为酋长家庭的成员,甚至是酋长本人。32西方的宣传家无休止地谈论机会平等;这些社会似乎确实存在着机会平等。然而,到目前为止,最常见的原因是他们在美洲原住民社区所经历的社会纽带的强度:相互关怀、爱,最重要的是幸福的品质,他们发现一旦回到欧洲环境中就不可能复制。“安全” 有多种形式。有一种安全感是知道自己在统计学上被箭射中的机会较小。还有一种安全感是知道如果一个人被射中,世界上会有一些人深深地关心他。
One gets the sense that indigenous life was, to put it very crudely, just a lot more interesting than life in a ‘Western’ town or city, especially insofar as the latter involved long hours of monotonous, repetitive, conceptually empty activity. The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.
我们可以感觉到,土著人的生活,说得非常粗俗,就是比 “西方” 城镇或城市的生活有趣得多,尤其是后者涉及到长时间的单调、重复、概念上空洞的活动。我们发现很难想象这样一种替代性的生活是如何无休止地吸引人和有趣的,这一事实也许更多地反映了我们想象力的局限性,而不是生活本身。
One of the most pernicious aspects of standard world-historical narratives is precisely that they dry everything up, reduce people to cardboard stereotypes, simplify the issues (are we inherently selfish and violent, or innately kind and co-operative?) in ways that themselves undermine, possibly even destroy, our sense of human possibility. ‘Noble’ savages are, ultimately, just as boring as savage ones; more to the point, neither actually exist. Helena Valero was herself adamant on this point. The Yanomami were not devils, she insisted, neither were they angels. They were human, like the rest of us.
标准的世界历史叙事最有害的方面之一,正是它们把一切都弄得干巴巴的,把人简化成纸板上的刻板印象,把问题简化(我们是天生自私和暴力,还是天生善良和合作?最终,“高贵的” 野蛮人和野蛮人一样无聊;更重要的是,两者都不存在。海伦娜·瓦莱罗本人在这一点上很坚定。她坚持认为,亚诺马米人不是魔鬼,也不是天使。他们是人,和我们其他人一样。
Now, we should be clear here: social theory always, necessarily, involves a bit of simplification. For instance, almost any human action might be said to have a political aspect, an economic aspect, a psycho-sexual aspect and so forth. Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say things that are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévi-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.
现在,我们应该清楚地认识到:社会理论总是必然涉及一些简化。例如,几乎任何人类行为都可以说是有政治方面、经济方面、性心理方面等等。社会理论在很大程度上是一种虚构的游戏,在这种游戏中,我们只是为了争论而假装只有一件事在发生:基本上,我们把一切都简化为卡通,以便能够检测出在其他方面看不见的模式。因此,社会科学的所有真正的进步都植根于敢于说出那些归根结底略显荒谬的东西:卡尔·马克思、西格蒙德·弗洛伊德或克劳德·列维·斯特劳斯的工作只是特别突出的例子。人们必须简化世界,才能发现其中的新东西。问题在于,在发现之后的很长一段时间里,人们还在继续简化。
Hobbes and Rousseau told their contemporaries things that were startling, profound and opened new doors of the imagination. Now their ideas are just tired common sense. There’s nothing in them that justifies the continued simplification of human affairs. If social scientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic, two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anything original, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists are expected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is to impoverish history – and as a consequence, to impoverish our sense of possibility. Let us end this introduction with an illustration, before moving on to the heart of the matter.
霍布斯和卢梭告诉他们同时代的人的事情是惊人的、深刻的,并且打开了想象力的新大门。现在,他们的想法只是疲惫的常识。在他们的,没有任何东西可以证明人类事务的持续简化是合理的。如果今天的社会科学家继续把过去几代人简化成简单的、二维的漫画,这并不是为了向我们展示什么原创性,而只是因为他们觉得这是社会科学家应该做的,以便显得 “科学”。实际的结果是使历史变得贫乏 —— 因此也使我们的可能性意识变得贫乏。在进入问题的核心之前,让我们用一个例子来结束这个介绍。
Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade’. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects – very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment – being moved around over enormous distances. Often these were just the sort of objects that anthropologists would later find being used as ‘primitive currencies’ all over the world. Surely this must prove capitalism in some form or another has always existed?
自亚当·斯密以来,那些试图证明当代竞争性市场交换形式植根于人类本性的人指出了他们所谓的 “原始贸易” 的存在。早在数万年前,人们就可以找到物品 —— 通常是宝石、贝壳或其他装饰品 —— 被远距离转移的证据。这些物品往往就是人类学家后来发现在世界各地作为 “原始货币” 使用的那种物品。当然,这必须证明以某种形式存在的资本主义一直存在?
The logic is perfectly circular. If precious objects were moving long distances, this is evidence of ‘trade’ and, if trade occurred, it must have taken some sort of commercial form; therefore, the fact that, say, 3,000 years ago Baltic amber found its way to the Mediterranean, or shells from the Gulf of Mexico were transported to Ohio, is proof that we are in the presence of some embryonic form of market economy. Markets are universal. Therefore, there must have been a market. Therefore, markets are universal. And so on.
这种逻辑是完全循环的。如果贵重物品被长途运输,这就是 “贸易” 的证据,如果贸易发生了,它一定采取了某种商业形式;因此,比如说 3000 年前波罗的海的琥珀被运到了地中海,或者墨西哥湾的贝壳被运到了俄亥俄州,这一事实证明我们处于某种市场经济的雏形中。市场是普遍存在的。因此,一定存在着市场。因此,市场是普遍的。以此类推。
All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. But lack of imagination is not itself an argument. It’s almost as if these writers are afraid to suggest anything that seems original, or, if they do, feel obliged to use vaguely scientific-sounding language (‘trans-regional interaction spheres’, ‘multi-scalar networks of exchange’) to avoid having to speculate about what precisely those things might be. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy.
这类作者真正要说的是,他们自己无法想象贵重物品可能以任何其他方式移动。但缺乏想象力本身并不是一个论点。几乎可以说,这些作者不敢提出任何有创意的建议,或者,如果他们这样做了,他们觉得有必要使用听起来很模糊的科学语言(“跨区域互动圈”,“多尺度的交换网络”),以避免猜测这些东西到底是什么。事实上,人类学提供了无穷无尽的例子,说明在没有任何类似于市场经济的情况下,有价值的物品是如何长途跋涉的。
The founding text of twentieth-century ethnography, Bronisław Malinowski’s 1922 Argonauts of the Western Pacific, describes how in the ‘kula chain’ of the Massim Islands off Papua New Guinea, men would undertake daring expeditions across dangerous seas in outrigger canoes, just in order to exchange precious heirloom arm-shells and necklaces for each other (each of the most important ones has its own name, and history of former owners) – only to hold it briefly, then pass it on again to a different expedition from another island. Heirloom treasures circle the island chain eternally, crossing hundreds of miles of ocean, arm-shells and necklaces in opposite directions. To an outsider, it seems senseless. To the men of the Massim it was the ultimate adventure, and nothing could be more important than to spread one’s name, in this fashion, to places one had never seen.
二十世纪民族学的奠基之作,布罗尼斯瓦夫(Bronisław) 马林诺夫斯基(Malinowski)在 1922 年的《西太平洋的阿戈纳特人》中描述了在巴布亚新几内亚附近的马西姆群岛的 “库拉链” 中,人们如何乘坐独木舟在危险的海面上进行大胆的探险。只是为了相互交换珍贵的传家宝臂壳和项链(每个最重要的臂壳和项链都有自己的名字,以及前主人的历史) —— 只是短暂地持有它,然后再把它传给来自另一个岛屿的不同探险队。传家宝永恒地围绕着岛链,穿越数百英里的海洋,臂壳和项链在相反的方向。对外人来说,这似乎毫无意义。对马西姆人来说,这是终极冒险,没有什么比以这种方式将自己的名字传播到从未见过的地方更重要了。
Is this ‘trade’? Perhaps, but it would bend to breaking point our ordinary understandings of what that word means. There is, in fact, a substantial ethnographic literature on how such long-distance exchange operates in societies without markets. Barter does occur: different groups may take on specialities – one is famous for its feather-work, another provides salt, in a third all women are potters – to acquire things they cannot produce themselves; sometimes one group will specialize in the very business of moving people and things around. But we often find such regional networks developing largely for the sake of creating friendly mutual relations, or having an excuse to visit one another from time to time;33 and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.
这是 “贸易” 吗?也许是,但它会使我们对这个词的含义的普通理解变得模糊不清。事实上,在没有市场的社会中,有大量的人种学文献论述了这种长距离的交换是如何运作的。以物易物的情况确实发生了:不同的群体可能会有自己的专长 —— 一个群体以其羽毛制品而闻名,另一个群体提供盐,在第三个群体中,所有的妇女都是陶工 —— 以获得他们自己无法生产的东西;有时一个群体会专门从事人员和物品的移动业务。但我们经常发现,这种区域网络的发展主要是为了建立友好的相互关系,或有借口不时地相互访问。33还有很多与 “贸易” 毫不相干的其他可能性。
Let’s list just a few, all drawn from North American material, to give the reader a taste of what might really be going on when people speak of ‘long-distance interaction spheres’ in the human past:
让我们只列举几个,都是来自北美的材料,让读者尝尝当人们谈到人类过去的 “远距离互动领域” 时,可能真的发生了什么。
1. Dreams or vision quests : among Iroquoian-speaking peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was considered extremely important literally to realize one’s dreams. Many European observers marvelled at how Indians would be willing to travel for days to bring back some object, trophy, crystal or even an animal like a dog that they had dreamed of acquiring. Anyone who dreamed about a neighbour or relative’s possession (a kettle, ornament, mask and so on) could normally demand it; as a result, such objects would often gradually travel some way from town to town. On the Great Plains, decisions to travel long distances in search of rare or exotic items could form part of vision quests.34
1.梦想或远景追求:在十六和十七世纪的伊鲁克语民族中,实现自己的梦想在字面上被认为是极其重要的。许多欧洲观察家惊叹于印第安人为了带回他们梦寐以求的一些物品、战利品、水晶甚至是狗等动物而不惜跋涉数日。任何人如果梦见邻居或亲戚的财物(水壶、装饰品、面具等),通常都可以要求得到它;因此,这类物品会,经常从一个镇子到另一个镇子逐渐走一段路。在大平原上,决定长途跋涉寻找稀有或奇特的物品,可能构成愿景追求的一部分。34
2. Travelling healers and entertainers : in 1528, when a shipwrecked Spaniard named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca made his way from Florida across what is now Texas to Mexico, he found he could pass easily between villages (even villages at war with one another) by offering his services as a magician and curer. Curers in much of North America were also entertainers, and would often develop significant entourages; those who felt their lives had been saved by the performance would, typically, offer up all their material possessions to be divided among the troupe.35 By such means, precious objects could easily travel very long distances.
2.旅行治疗师和艺人:1528 年,当一个名叫阿尔瓦·努涅斯·卡贝萨·德·瓦卡的西班牙人乘船从佛罗里达州穿过现在的德克萨斯州前往墨西哥时,他发现他可以通过提供魔术师和治疗师的服务,在村庄之间轻松通行(甚至是相互交战的村庄)。在北美的大部分地区,治疗师也是艺人,而且往往会形成重要的随行人员;那些认为自己的生命因表演而得到拯救的人,通常会献出他们所有的物质财富,由剧团分担。35通过这种方式,珍贵的物品可以很容易地传到很远的地方。
3. Women’s gambling : women in many indigenous North American societies were inveterate gamblers; the women of adjacent villages would often meet to play dice or a game played with a bowl and plum stone, and would typically bet their shell beads or other objects of personal adornment as the stakes. One archaeologist versed in the ethnographic literature, Warren DeBoer, estimates that many of the shells and other exotica discovered in sites halfway across the continent had got there by being endlessly wagered, and lost, in inter-village games of this sort, over very long periods of time.36
3.妇女的赌博:许多北美原住民社会的妇女都是不折不扣的赌徒;相邻村庄的妇女经常聚会,玩骰子或用碗和梅花石玩的游戏,通常会用她们的贝壳珠子或其他个人装饰品作为赌注。一位精通人种学文献的考古学家沃伦·德波尔估计,在半个大陆的遗址中发现的许多贝壳和其他异物都是在这种村落间的游戏中无休止地下注和输掉的,而且时间很长。36
We could multiply examples, but assume that by now the reader gets the broader point we are making. When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.
我们可以举出更多的例子,但假设读者现在已经明白了我们所要表达的更广泛的观点。当我们简单地猜测其他时间和地点的人类可能在做什么时,我们几乎无一例外地做出了不那么有趣、不那么古怪的猜测 —— 总之,比起可能发生的事情,人类的猜测要少得多。
In this book we will not only be presenting a new history of humankind, but inviting the reader into a new science of history, one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity. Rather than asking how we ended up unequal, we will start by asking how it was that ‘inequality’ became such an issue to begin with, then gradually build up an alternative narrative that corresponds more closely to our current state of knowledge. If humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what did they imply? What was really happening in those periods we usually see as marking the emergence of ‘the state’? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.
在这本书中,我们不仅要展示一部新的人类历史,而且要邀请读者进入一门新的历史科学,使我们的祖先恢复其全部人性。我们不问,而是先问 “不平等” 是如何开始成为这样一个问题的,然后逐步建立起一个更符合我们目前知识状况的替代性叙述。如果人类在进化过程中的 95% 的时间不是在小规模的狩猎采集者中度过的,那么他们一直在做什么?如果农业和城市并不意味着陷入等级制度和统治,那么它们意味着什么?在那些我们通常认为标志着 “国家” 出现的时期,到底发生了什么?答案往往是出乎意料的,并表明人类历史的进程可能不那么一成不变,而比我们倾向于假设的更充满了游戏的可能性。
In one sense, then, this book is simply trying to lay down foundations for a new world history, rather as Gordon Childe did when, back in the 1930s, he invented phrases like ‘the Neolithic Revolution’ or ‘the Urban Revolution’. As such it is necessarily uneven and incomplete. At the same time, this book is also something else: a quest to discover the right questions. If ‘what is the origin of inequality?’ is not the biggest question we should be asking about history, what then should it be? As the stories of one-time captives escaping back to the woods again make clear, Rousseau was not entirely mistaken. Something has been lost. He just had a rather idiosyncratic (and ultimately, false) notion of what it was. How do we characterize it, then? And how lost is it really? What does it imply about possibilities for social change today?
因此,从某种意义上说,这本书只是试图为新的世界历史打下基础,就像戈登·奇尔德在 1930 年代发明 “新石器时代革命” 或 “城市革命” 这样的短语一样。因此,它必然是不平衡和不完整的。同时,这本书也是别的东西:对发现正确问题的探索。如果 “不平等的起源是什么?” 不是我们应该对历史提出的最大问题,那么应该是什么?正如那些曾经的俘虏再次逃回森林的故事所表明的那样,卢梭并不是完全错误的。有些东西已经失去了。他只是对它是什么有一个相当特异的(而且最终是错误的)概念。那么,我们该如何描述它呢?它到底失去了多少?它对今天社会变革的可能性意味着什么?
For about a decade now, we – that is, the two authors of this book – have been engaged in a prolonged conversation with each other about exactly these questions. This is the reason for the book’s somewhat unusual structure, which begins by tracing the historical roots of the question (‘what is the origin of social inequality?’) back to a series of encounters between European colonists and Native American intellectuals in the seventeenth century. The impact of those encounters upon what we now term the Enlightenment, and indeed our basic conceptions of human history, is both more subtle and profound than we usually care to admit. Revisiting them, as we discovered, has startling implications for how we make sense of the human past today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself. In the end, we decided to write a book that would echo, to some degree at least, that evolution in our own thought. In those conversations, the real breakthrough moment came when we decided to move away from European thinkers like Rousseau entirely, and instead consider perspectives that derive from those indigenous thinkers who ultimately inspired them.
大约十年来,我们 —— 也就是本书的两位作者 —— 一直在就这些问题彼此进行长时间的对话。这就是本书的结构有些不寻常的原因,它从追溯问题的历史根源(“社会不平等的起源是什么?”)开始,追溯到 17 世纪欧洲殖民者和美洲本土知识分子之间的一系列遭遇。这些接触对我们现在所称的启蒙运动,乃至我们对人类历史的基本概念的影响,比我们通常愿意承认的更加微妙和深刻。正如我们发现的那样,重新审视它们对我们今天如何理解人类的过去,包括农业、财产、城市、民主、奴隶制和文明本身的起源,有着惊人的影响。最后,我们决定写一本书,至少在某种程度上响应我们自己思想的演变。在这些对话中,真正的突破时刻出现了,我们决定完全远离像卢梭这样的欧洲思想家,转而考虑源自那些最终启发他们的本土思想家的观点。
So let us begin right there.
因此,让我们从这里开始。
The indigenous critique and the myth of progress
Jean-Jacques Rousseau left us a story about the origins of social inequality that continues to be told and retold, in endless variations, to this day. It is the story of humanity’s original innocence, and unwitting departure from a state of pristine simplicity on a voyage of technological discovery that would ultimately guarantee both our ‘complexity’ and our enslavement. How did this ambivalent story of civilization come about?
让·雅克·卢梭给我们留下了一个关于社会不平等的起源的故事,这个故事至今仍在不断地被讲述和重述,变化无穷。这个故事讲述了人类最初的天真无邪,在不知不觉中离开了原始的简单状态,踏上了技术探索的旅程,最终保证了我们的 “复杂性” 和被奴役。这个矛盾的文明故事是如何产生的?
Intellectual historians have never really abandoned the Great Man theory of history. They often write as if all important ideas in a given age can be traced back to one or other extraordinary individual – whether Plato, Confucius, Adam Smith or Karl Marx – rather than seeing such authors’ writings as particularly brilliant interventions in debates that were already going on in taverns or dinner parties or public gardens (or, for that matter, lecture rooms), but which otherwise might never have been written down. It’s a bit like pretending William Shakespeare had somehow invented the English language. In fact, many of Shakespeare’s most brilliant turns of phrase turn out to have been common expressions of the day, which any Elizabethan Englishman or woman would be likely to have thrown into casual conversation, and whose authors remain as obscure as those of knock-knock jokes – even if, were it not for Shakespeare, they’d probably have passed out of use and been forgotten long ago.
知识分子史学家从未真正放弃过历史的伟人理论。他们经常写道,似乎某个时代的所有重要思想都可以追溯到一个或其他非凡的个人 —— 无论是柏拉图、孔子、亚当·斯密还是卡尔·马克思 —— 而不是把这些作者的著作看作是对已经在酒馆、晚宴或公共花园(或者,就此而言,在演讲室)进行的辩论的特别出色的干预,否则这些辩论可能永远不会被写下来。这有点像假装威廉·莎士比亚以某种方式发明了英语。事实上,莎士比亚许多最精彩的短语都是当时常见的表达方式,任何一个伊丽莎白时代的英国人都有可能在闲聊中提到这些表达方式,而这些表达方式的作者就像那些敲门砖的笑话一样不为人知 —— 即使不是因为莎士比亚,它们可能早就被淘汰,被遗忘。
All this applies to Rousseau. Intellectual historians sometimes write as if Rousseau had personally kicked off the debate about social inequality with his 1754 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind . In fact, he wrote it to submit to an essay contest on the subject.
所有这些都适用于卢梭。思想史家们有时写道,似乎卢梭在 1754 年的《论人类不平等的起源和基础》中亲自掀起了关于社会不平等的辩论。事实上,他写这篇文章是为了提交给一个关于这个问题的征文比赛。
In March 1754, the learned society known as the Académie des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de Dijon announced a national essay competition on the question: ‘what is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?’ What we’d like to do in this chapter is ask: why is it that a group of scholars in Ancien Régime France, hosting a national essay contest, would have felt this was an appropriate question in the first place? The way the question is put, after all, assumes that social inequality did have an origin; that is, it takes for granted that there was a time when human beings were equals – and that something then happened to change this situation.
1754 年 3 月,被称为第戎科学、艺术和文学学院的学术团体宣布了一项关于以下问题的全国性征文比赛:“人与人之间不平等的起源是什么,它是否得到了自然法的授权?” 在这一章中,我们想问的是:为什么古法国的一群学者在举办全国征文比赛时,首先会觉得这是一个合适的问题?毕竟,提出这个问题的方式是假设社会不平等确实有一个起源;也就是说,它想当然地认为曾经有一个人类平等的时代 —— 然后发生了一些事情来改变这种状况。
That is actually quite a startling thing for people living under an absolutist monarchy like that of Louis XV to think. After all, it’s not as if anyone in France at that time had much personal experience of living in a society of equals. This was a culture in which almost every aspect of human interaction – whether eating, drinking, working or socializing – was marked by elaborate pecking orders and rituals of social deference. The authors who submitted their essays to this competition were men who spent their lives having all their needs attended to by servants. They lived off the patronage of dukes and archbishops, and rarely entered a building without knowing the precise order of importance of everyone inside. Rousseau was one such man: an ambitious young philosopher, he was at the time engaged in an elaborate project of trying to sleep his way into influence at court. The closest he’d likely ever come to experiencing social equality himself was someone doling out equal slices of cake at a dinner party. Yet everyone at the time also agreed that this situation was somehow unnatural; that it had not always been that way.
对于生活在像路易十五那样的绝对主义君主制下的人们来说,这实际上是一件很令人吃惊的事情。毕竟,在当时的法国,好像没有人对生活在一个平等的社会里有什么个人经验。在这种文化中,人类互动的几乎每一个方面 —— 无论是吃、喝、工作还是社交 —— 都以精心设计的啄食秩序和社会敬畏仪式为标志。向这次比赛提交论文的作者都是一辈子由仆人满足其所有需求的人。他们靠公爵和大主教的赞助过活,很少在不知道里面每个人的确切重要性的情况下进入一个建筑物。卢梭就是这样一个人:一个雄心勃勃的年轻哲学家,当时他正从事一项精心策划的计划,试图通过睡觉的方式在宫廷中获得影响力。他自己最接近体验社会平等的地方可能是有人在晚宴上分发平等的蛋糕片。然而,当时每个人都同意,这种情况在某种程度上是不自然的;它并不总是这样的。
If we want to understand why that was, we need to look not only at France, but also at France’s place in a much larger world.
如果我们想了解为什么会这样,那么,我们不仅要看法国,还要看法国在一个更大的世界中的地位。
Fascination with the question of social inequality was relatively new in the 1700s, and it had everything to do with the shock and confusion that followed Europe’s sudden integration into a global economy, where it had long been a very minor player.
对社会不平等问题的迷恋在 17 世纪相对较新,它与欧洲突然融入全球经济后的震惊和混乱,在那里它长期以来一直是一个非常小的角色。
In the Middle Ages, most people in other parts of the world who actually knew anything about northern Europe at all considered it an obscure and uninviting backwater full of religious fanatics who, aside from occasional attacks on their neighbours (‘the Crusades’), were largely irrelevant to global trade and world politics.1 European intellectuals of that time were just rediscovering Aristotle and the ancient world, and had very little idea what people were thinking and arguing about anywhere else. All this changed, of course, in the late fifteenth century, when Portuguese fleets began rounding Africa and bursting into the Indian Ocean – and especially with the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Suddenly, a few of the more powerful European kingdoms found themselves in control of vast stretches of the globe, and European intellectuals found themselves exposed, not only to the civilizations of China and India but to a whole plethora of previously unimagined social, scientific and political ideas. The ultimate result of this flood of new ideas came to be known as the ‘Enlightenment’.
在中世纪,世界上其他地方的大多数人,如果对北欧有任何了解,都认为它是一个晦涩难懂的落后地区,到处都是宗教狂热者,除了偶尔对邻国发动攻击(“十字军东征”)外,对全球贸易和世界政治基本没有影响。1当时的欧洲知识分子刚刚重新发现亚里士多德和古代世界,对其他地方的人们在思考和争论什么知之甚少。当然,这一切在 15 世纪末发生了变化,葡萄牙舰队开始绕过非洲,冲进印度洋 —— 特别是随着西班牙对美洲的征服。突然间,几个更强大的欧洲王国发现自己控制了全球的大片土地,欧洲知识分子发现自己不仅接触到了中国和印度的文明,还接触到了大量以前无法想象的社会、科学和政治思想。这场新思想洪流的最终结果被称为 “启蒙运动”。
Of course, this isn’t usually the way historians of ideas tell this story. Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.2
当然,这通常不是思想史家讲述这个故事的方式。我们不仅被教导要把思想史看作是主要由个人写伟大的书或思考伟大的思想而产生的东西,而且这些 “伟大的思想家” 被认为是在几乎完全参照对方的情况下进行这两种活动。因此,即使在启蒙思想家公开坚持他们的思想来自外国的情况下(就像德国哲学家戈特弗里德·威廉·莱布尼茨在敦促他的同胞采用中国的国家管理模式时那样),当代历史学家也倾向于坚持他们并不是真的。否则,当他们说他们在接受中国、波斯或美洲本土的思想时,这些思想根本就不是真正的中国、波斯或美洲本土的思想,而是他们自己编造出来的,只是归因于异国他乡。2
These are remarkably arrogant assumptions – as if ‘Western thought’ (as it later came to be known) was such a powerful and monolithic body of ideas that no one else could possibly have any meaningful influence on it. It’s also pretty obviously untrue. Just consider the case of Leibniz: over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European governments gradually came to adopt the idea that every government should properly preside over a population of largely uniform language and culture, run by a bureaucratic officialdom trained in the liberal arts whose members had succeeded in passing competitive exams. It might seem surprising that they did so, since nothing remotely like that had existed in any previous period of European history. Yet it was almost exactly the system that had existed for centuries in China.
这些都是非常傲慢的假设 —— 仿佛 “西方思想”(后来被称为 “西方思想”)是如此强大和单一的思想体系,以至于没有人可能对它产生任何有意义的影响。这显然也是不真实的。只要考虑一下莱布尼茨的情况:在十八和十九世纪的过程中,欧洲政府逐渐采纳了这样的想法:每个政府都应该适当地主持一个语言和文化基本统一的人口,由一个受过文科训练的官场管理,其成员都成功通过了竞争性考试。他们这样做似乎令人惊讶,因为在欧洲历史上的任何时期都不曾有过这样的情况。然而,这几乎完全是在中国已经存在了几个世纪的制度。
Are we really to insist that the advocacy of Chinese models of statecraft by Leibniz, his allies and followers really had nothing to do with the fact that Europeans did, in fact, adopt something that looks very much like Chinese models of statecraft? What is really unusual about this case is that Leibniz was so honest about his intellectual influences. When he lived, Church authorities still wielded a great deal of power in most of Europe: anyone making an argument that non-Christian ways were in any way superior might find themselves facing charges of atheism, which was potentially a capital offence.3
难道我们真的要坚持认为,莱布尼茨、他的盟友和追随者对中国治国模式的倡导,与欧洲人事实上确实采用了很像中国治国模式的东西无关?这个案例真正不寻常的地方在于,莱布尼茨对他的思想影响是如此诚实。在他生活的年代,教会当局在欧洲大部分地区仍然掌握着很大的权力:任何提出非基督教方式有任何优越性的论点的人都可能发现自己面临无神论的指控,而这有可能是一种死刑。3
It is much the same with the question of inequality. If we ask, not ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’ but ‘what are the origins of the question about the origins of social inequality?’ (in other words, how did it come about that, in 1754, the Académie de Dijon would think this an appropriate question to ask?), then we are immediately confronted with a long history of Europeans arguing with one another about the nature of faraway societies: in this case, particularly in the Eastern Woodlands of North America. What’s more, a lot of those conversations make reference to arguments that took place between Europeans and indigenous Americans about the nature of freedom, equality or for that matter rationality and revealed religion – indeed, most of the themes that would later become central to Enlightenment political thought.
不平等的问题也是如此。如果我们问,不是 “社会不平等的起源是什么?” 而是 “关于社会不平等的起源问题的起源是什么?”(换句话说,在 1754 年,第戎学院会认为这是一个合适的问题,这是怎么来的?),那么我们就会立即面对欧洲人互相争论遥远社会的性质的漫长历史:在这种情况下,特别是在北美东部林地。更重要的是,这些对话中很多都提到了欧洲人和美洲原住民之间关于自由、平等或理性和启示宗教的性质的争论 —— 事实上,大多数主题后来都成为启蒙运动政治思想的核心。
Many influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from Native American sources – even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case. Indigenous people are assumed to have lived in a completely different universe, inhabited a different reality, even; anything Europeans said about them was simply a shadow-play projection, fantasies of the ‘noble savage’ culled from the European tradition itself.4
许多有影响力的启蒙思想家事实上声称,他们在这个问题上的一些想法直接来自美洲原住民 —— 尽管可以预见的是,今天的知识分子历史学家坚持认为这不可能是真的。土著人被认为生活在一个完全不同的宇宙中,甚至居住在一个不同的现实中;欧洲人关于他们的任何说法都只是一个影子游戏的投影,是从欧洲传统中摘取的 “高贵的野蛮人” 的幻想。4
Of course, such historians typically frame this position as a critique of Western arrogance (‘how can you suggest that genocidal imperialists were actually listening to those whose societies they were in the process of stamping out?’), but it could equally well be seen as a form of Western arrogance in its own right. There is no contesting that European traders, missionaries and settlers did actually engage in prolonged conversations with people they encountered in what they called the New World, and often lived among them for extended periods of time – even as they also colluded in their destruction. We also know that many of those living in Europe who came to embrace principles of freedom and equality (principles barely existing in their countries a few generations before) claimed that accounts of these encounters had a profound influence on their thinking. To deny any possibility that they were right is, effectively, to insist that indigenous people could not possibly have any real impact on history. It is, in fact, a way of infantilizing non-Westerners: a practice denounced by these very same authors.
当然,这类历史学家通常将这一立场设定为对西方傲慢的批判(“你怎么能说种族灭绝的帝国主义者实际上在倾听那些他们正在铲除的社会的声音呢?”),但这同样可以被视为西方傲慢本身的一种形式。毋庸置疑,欧洲商人、传教士和定居者确实与他们在所谓的新世界遇到的人进行了长时间的对话,并经常长期生活在他们中间 —— 即使他们也在串通破坏他们。我们还知道,许多生活在欧洲的人开始接受自由和平等的原则(这些原则在他们国家几代人之前几乎不存在),他们声称这些遭遇的描述对他们的思想产生了深刻的影响。否认他们是正确的任何可能性,实际上就是坚持认为土著人不可能对历史产生任何真正的影响。事实上,这是一种对非西方人进行幼稚化的方式:这也是这些作者所谴责的做法。
In recent years, a growing number of American scholars, most themselves of indigenous descent, have challenged these assumptions.5 Here we follow in their footsteps. Basically, we are going to retell the story, starting from the assumption that all parties to the conversation between European colonists and their indigenous interlocutors were adults, and that, at least occasionally, they actually listened to each other. If we do this, even familiar histories suddenly begin to look very different. In fact, what we’ll see is not only that indigenous Americans – confronted with strange foreigners – gradually developed their own, surprisingly consistent critique of European institutions, but that these critiques came to be taken very seriously in Europe itself.
近年来,越来越多的美洲学者,其中大多数人本身是原住民后裔,对这些假设提出了挑战。5在这里,我们追随他们的脚步。基本上,我们将重新讲述这个故事,从以下假设开始:欧洲殖民者和他们的原住民对话者之间的所有各方都是成年人,而且,至少偶尔,他们确实听了对方的话。如果我们这样做,即使是熟悉的历史也会突然开始变得非常不同。事实上,我们将看到的不仅是美洲原住民 —— 面对陌生的外国人 —— 逐渐发展出他们自己的、令人惊讶的对欧洲机构的一致批判,而且这些批判在欧洲本身也被非常认真地对待。
Just how seriously can hardly be overstated. For European audiences, the indigenous critique would come as a shock to the system, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, once disclosed, could hardly be ignored. Indeed, the ideas expressed in that critique came to be perceived as such a menace to the fabric of European society that an entire body of theory was called into being, specifically to refute them. As we will shortly see, the whole story we summarized in the last chapter – our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.
至于有多严重,怎么强调都不为过。对于欧洲观众来说,本土批判是对系统的冲击,它揭示了人类解放的可能性,一旦披露,就很难被忽视。事实上,这种批判所表达的思想被认为是对欧洲社会结构的威胁,以至于整个理论体系被召唤出来,专门用来驳斥它们。我们很快就会看到,我们在上一章中总结的整个故事 —— 我们关于人类文明的矛盾进展的标准历史元叙事,即随着,社会越来越大,越来越复杂,自由就会丧失 —— 主要是为了消除本土批判的威胁而发明的。
The first thing to emphasize is that ‘the origin of social inequality’ is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden, as the thirteenth-century philosopher Thomas Aquinas observed, Adam clearly outranked Eve. ‘Social equality’ – and therefore, its opposite, inequality – simply did not exist as a concept. A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus. So one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them.6
首先要强调的是,“社会不平等的起源” 对中世纪的任何人来说都不是一个有意义的问题。阶级和等级制度被认为从一开始就已经存在了。甚至在伊甸园里,正如 13 世纪的哲学家托马斯·阿奎那(Thomas Aquinas)所观察到的,亚当的地位明显高于夏娃。“社会平等” —— 由此,它的反面 —— “不平等” —— 作为一个概念根本不存在。两位意大利学者最近对中世纪文献的调查实际上没有发现任何证据表明,在哥伦布时代之前,拉丁语的 aequalitas 或 inaequalitas 或其英语、法语、西班牙语、德语和意大利语的同义词根本就被用来描述社会关系。因此,我们甚至不能说中世纪的思想家们拒绝了社会平等的概念:他们似乎从来没有想过可能存在的想法。6
In fact, the terms ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ only began to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of Europe’s discoveries in the New World.
事实上,“平等” 和 “不平等” 这两个词是在 17 世纪初,在自然法理论的影响下才开始进入人们的视野。而自然法理论又主要是在关于欧洲在新世界的发现所带来的道德和法律影响的辩论过程中产生的。
It’s important to remember that Spanish adventurers like Cortés and Pizarro carried out their conquests largely without authorization from higher authorities; afterwards, there were intense debates back home over whether such unvarnished aggression against people who, after all, posed no threat to Europeans could really be justified.7 The key problem was that – unlike non-Christians of the Old World, who could be assumed to have had the opportunity to learn the teachings of Jesus, and therefore to have actively rejected them – it was fairly obvious that the inhabitants of the New World simply never had any exposure to Christian ideas. So they couldn’t be classed as infidels.
重要的是要记住,像科尔特斯和皮萨罗这样的西班牙冒险家在很大程度上是在没有上级授权的情况下进行征服的;事后,国内对这种对毕竟对欧洲人不构成威胁的人进行不加掩饰的侵略是否真的合理进行了激烈的辩论。7关键问题在于 —— 与旧世界的非基督徒不同,可以认为他们有机会学习耶稣的教义,因此会主动拒绝这些教义 —— 相当明显,新世界的居民根本没有接触过基督教思想。所以他们不能被归类为异教徒。
The conquistadors generally finessed this question by reading a declaration in Latin calling on all the Indians to convert before attacking them. Legal scholars in universities like Salamanca in Spain were not impressed by this expedient. At the same time, attempts to write off the inhabitants of the Americas as so utterly alien that they fell outside the bounds of humanity entirely, and could be treated literally like animals, also didn’t find much purchase. Even cannibals, the jurists noted, had governments, societies and laws, and were able to construct arguments to defend the justice of their (cannibalistic) social arrangements; therefore they were clearly humans, vested by God with powers of reason.
征服者们通常通过宣读拉丁文宣言来解决这个问题,呼吁所有印第安人在攻击他们之前改变信仰。西班牙萨拉曼卡等大学的法律学者对这种权宜之计不以为然。同时,试图把美洲居民写成完全陌生的人,以至于他们完全不属于人类的范围,可以像动物一样被对待,也没有找到多少人买账。法学家们指出,即使是食人族,也有政府、社会和法律,并且能够构建论据来捍卫他们(食人族)社会安排的正义性;因此他们显然是人类,被上帝赋予了理性的力量。
The legal and philosophical question then became: what rights do human beings have simply by dint of being human – that is, what rights could they be said to have ‘naturally’, even if they existed in a State of Nature, innocent of the teachings of written philosophy and revealed religion, and without codified laws? The matter was hotly debated. We need not linger here on the exact formulae that natural law theorists came up with (suffice to say, they did allow that Americans had natural rights, but ended up justifying their conquest anyway, provided their subsequent treatment was not too violent or oppressive), but what is important, in this context, is that they opened a conceptual door. Writers like Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius or John Locke could skip past the biblical narratives everyone used to start with, and begin instead with a question such as: what might humans have been like in a State of Nature, when all they had was their humanity?
于是,法律和哲学问题变成了:人类仅仅因为是人而拥有什么权利 —— 也就是说,即使他们存在于自然状态中,没有书面哲学和启示宗教的教义,也没有成文的法律,他们可以说是 “自然” 拥有什么权利?这个问题引起了激烈的争论。我们没有必要在此纠缠于自然法理论家提出的确切公式(只需说,他们确实允许美洲人拥有自然权利,但最终还是为他们的征服行为辩护,只要他们随后的待遇不是太暴力或压迫),但重要的是,在这种情况下,他们打开了一扇概念性的大门。像托马斯·霍布斯、雨果·格劳秀斯或约翰·洛克这样的作家可以跳过每个人都用来开始的圣经叙述,而从一个问题开始,例如:当人类拥有的只是他们的人性时,在自然状态下可能是什么样子?
Each of these authors populated the State of Nature with what they took to be the simplest societies known in the Western Hemisphere, and thus they concluded that the original state of humanity was one of freedom and equality, for better or worse (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse). It’s important to stop here for a moment and consider why they came to this verdict – because it was by no means an obvious or inevitable conclusion.
这些作者中的每一位都用他们认为是西半球已知的最简单的社会来填充自然状态,因此他们得出结论,人类的原始状态是自由和平等的,无论好坏(例如,霍布斯肯定认为它更糟糕)。重要的是,在此停一停,考虑一下他们为什么会得出这个结论 —— 因为这绝不是一个明显或不可避免的结论。
First of all, while it may seem obvious to us, the fact that natural law theorists in the seventeenth century fixed on apparently simple societies as exemplars of primordial times – societies like the Algonkians of North America’s Eastern Woodlands, or the Caribs and Amazonians, rather than urban civilizations like the Aztecs or Inca – would not have seemed obvious at the time.
首先,虽然在我们看来很明显,但十七世纪的自然法理论家将明显简单的社会固定为原始时代的典范 —— 像北美东部林地的阿尔贡人或加勒比人和亚马逊人这样的社会,而不是像阿兹特克人或印加人这样的城市文明 —— 在当时似乎并不明显。
Earlier authors, confronted by a population of forest dwellers with no king and employing only stone tools, were unlikely to have seen them as in any way primordial. Sixteenth-century scholars, such as the Spanish missionary José de Acosta, were more likely to conclude they were looking at the fallen vestiges of some ancient civilization, or refugees who had, in the course of their wanderings, forgotten the arts of metallurgy and civil governance. Such a conclusion would have made obvious common sense for people who assumed that all truly important knowledge had been revealed by God at the beginning of time, that cities had existed before the Flood, and that saw their own intellectual life largely as attempts to recover the lost wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans.
早期的作者,面对没有国王、只使用石器的森林居民,不太可能把他们看作是原始人。十六世纪的学者,如西班牙传教士何塞·德·阿科斯塔(José de Acosta),更有可能得出结论,他们看到的是某种古代文明的堕落残余,或,这些难民在流浪的过程中忘记了冶金和公民管理的艺术。这样的结论对于那些认为所有真正重要的知识都是由上帝在开天辟地之时揭示出来的人来说是显而易见的常识,城市在大洪水之前就已经存在,而且他们认为自己的知识生活主要是试图恢复古希腊人和罗马人的失落智慧。
History, in Renaissance Europe of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, was not a story of progress. It was largely a series of disasters. Introducing the concept of a State of Nature didn’t exactly flip all this around, at least not immediately, but it did allow political philosophers after the seventeenth century to imagine people without the trappings of civilization as something other than degenerate savages; as a kind of humanity ‘in the raw’. And this, in turn, allowed them to ask a host of new questions about what it meant to be human. What social forms would still exist, even among people who had no recognizable form of law or government? Would marriage exist? What forms might it take? Would Natural Man tend to be naturally gregarious, or would people tend to avoid one another? Was there such a thing as natural religion?
在 15 至 16 世纪的文艺复兴时期的欧洲,历史不是一个进步的故事。它主要是一系列的灾难。引入自然国的概念并没有完全扭转这一切,至少没有立即扭转,但它确实让十七世纪后的政治哲学家们把没有文明外衣的人想象成退化的野蛮人以外的东西;想象成一种 “原始” 的人类。而这反过来又使他们能够提出一系列关于人类意味着什么的新问题。即使在没有可识别的法律或政府形式的人群中,什么社会形式仍然存在?婚姻会存在吗?它可能采取什么形式?自然人是否会倾向于自然聚居,还是人们会倾向于相互回避?是否存在自然宗教这种东西?
But the question still remains: why is it that by the eighteenth century, European intellectuals had come to fix on the idea of primordial freedom or, especially, equality, to such an extent that it seemed perfectly natural to ask a question like ‘what is the origin of inequality among men?’ This seems particularly odd considering how, prior to that time, most did not even consider social equality possible.
但问题仍然存在:为什么到了 18 世纪,欧洲知识分子已经固定在原始自由或特别是平等的观念上,以至于提出 “人与人之间不平等的起源是什么” 这样的问题似乎非常自然?考虑到在那之前,大多数人甚至不认为社会平等是可能的,这似乎特别奇怪。
First of all, a qualification is in order. A certain folk egalitarianism already existed in the Middle Ages, coming to the fore during popular festivals like carnival, May Day or Christmas, when much of society revelled in the idea of a ‘world turned upside down’, where all powers and authorities were knocked to the ground or made a mockery of. Often the celebrations were framed as a return to some primordial ‘age of equality’ – the Age of Cronus, or Saturn, or the land of Cockaygne. Sometimes, too, these ideals were invoked in popular revolts.
首先,需要做一个限定。某种民间平等主义在中世纪已经存在,在狂欢节、五一节或圣诞节等流行的节日里凸显出来,当时社会上很多人都陶醉于 “世界被颠覆” 的想法,所有的权力和权威都被打倒在地或被嘲弄了。庆祝活动往往被设定为回到某种原始的 “平等时代” —— 克洛诺斯时代,或土星时代,或科凯恩(Cockaygne)的土地。有时,这些理想也会在民众起义中被援引。
True, it’s never entirely clear how far such egalitarian ideals are merely a side effect of hierarchical social arrangements that obtained at ordinary times. Our notion that everyone is equal before the law, for instance, originally traces back to the idea that everyone is equal before the king, or emperor: since if one man is invested with absolute power, then obviously everyone else is equal in comparison. Early Christianity similarly insisted that all believers were (in some ultimate sense) equal in relation to God, whom they referred to as ‘the Lord’. As this illustrates, the overarching power under which ordinary mortals are all de facto equals need not be a real flesh-and-blood human; one of the whole points of creating a ‘carnival king’ or ‘May queen’ is that they exist in order to be dethroned.8
诚然,这种平等主义的理想在多大程度上仅仅是在普通时期获得的等级社会安排的副作用,这一点从来就不完全清楚。例如,我们关于法律面前人人平等的概念,最初可以追溯到国王或皇帝面前人人平等的想法:因为如果一个人被赋予了绝对的权力,那么显然其他人相比之下是平等的。早期基督教同样坚持认为,所有信徒(在某种终极意义上)在上帝面前都是平等的,他们称上帝为 “主”。正如这一点所说明的,普通人事实上都是平等的,在这种情况下,首要的权力不一定是真正有血有肉的人;创造一个 “狂欢节国王” 或 “五月女王” 的全部意义之一就是他们的存在是为了被推翻。8
Europeans educated in classical literature would also have been familiar with speculation about long-ago, happy, egalitarian orders that appear in Greco-Roman sources; and notions of equality, at least among Christian nations, were to be found in the concept of res publica, or commonwealth, which again looked to ancient precedents. All this is only to say that a state of equality was not utterly inconceivable to European intellectuals before the eighteenth century. None of it, however, explains why they came almost universally to assume that human beings, innocent of civilization, would ever exist in such a state. True, there were classical precedents for such ideas, but there were classical precedents for the opposite as well.9 For answers, we must return to arguments deployed to establish that the inhabitants of the Americas were fellow humans to begin with: to assert that, however exotic or even perverse their customs might seem, Native Americans were capable of making logical arguments in their own defence.
受过古典文学教育的欧洲人也会熟悉希腊·罗马资料中出现的关于很久以前的、幸福的、平等主义的秩序的猜测;平等的概念,至少在基督教国家中,可以在 res publica(或称公有制)的概念中找到,这也是参考古代的先例。所有这些只是想说,在 18 世纪之前,欧洲知识分子并非完全无法想象平等的状态。然而,这一切都不能解释为什么他们几乎普遍认为人类,在文明中是无辜的,会存在于这样一种状态。诚然,这种想法有古典的先例,但也有古典的先例是相反的。9为了找到答案,我们必须回到为确定美洲居民从一开始就是人类同胞而使用的论据:断言无论他们的习俗看起来多么异乎寻常甚至反常,美洲原住民都有能力为自己的辩护进行逻辑论证。
What we’re going to suggest is that American intellectuals – we are using the term ‘American’ as it was used at the time, to refer to indigenous inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere; and ‘intellectual’ to refer to anyone in the habit of arguing about abstract ideas – actually played a role in this conceptual revolution. It is very strange that this should be considered a particularly radical idea, but among mainstream intellectual historians today it is almost a heresy.
我们要提出的是,美洲知识分子 —— 我们使用的是当时使用的 “美洲人” 一词,指的是西半球的本土居民;而 “知识分子” 指的是任何有争论抽象概念习惯的人 —— 实际上在这场概念革命中发挥了作用。非常奇怪的是,这应该被认为是一个特别激进的想法,但在今天的主流思想史学家中,这几乎是一个异端。
What makes this especially odd is that no one denies that many European explorers, missionaries, traders, settlers and others who sojourned on American shores spent years learning native languages and perfecting their skills in conversation with native speakers; just as indigenous Americans did the work of learning Spanish, English, Dutch or French. Neither, we think, would anyone who has ever learned a truly alien language deny that doing so takes a great deal of imaginative work, trying to grasp unfamiliar concepts. We also know that missionaries typically conducted long philosophical debates as part of their professional duties; many others, on both sides, argued with one another either out of simple curiosity, or because they had immediate practical reasons to understand the other’s point of view. Finally, no one would deny that travel literature, and missionary relations – which often contained summaries of, or even extracts from, these exchanges – were popular literary genres, avidly followed by educated Europeans. Any middle-class household in eighteenth-century Amsterdam or Grenoble would have been likely to have on its shelves at the very least a copy of the Jesuit Relations of New France (as France’s North American colonies were then known), and one or two accounts written by voyagers to faraway lands. Such books were appreciated largely because they contained surprising and unprecedented ideas.10
让人感到特别奇怪的是,没有人否认,许多欧洲探险家、传教士、商人、定居者和其他在美洲海岸定居的人花了数年时间学习当地语言,完善他们与当地人交谈的技巧;就像美洲土著人学习西班牙语、英语、荷兰语或法语的工作。我们认为,任何曾经学习过真正的外来语言的人也不会否认,这样做需要大量的想象力工作,试图掌握陌生的概念。我们还知道,传教士通常会进行长时间的哲学辩论,作为他们职业职责的一部分;其他许多人,在双方中,要么是出于简单的好奇心,要么是因为他们有直接的实际理由来理解对方的观点,而相互争论。最后,没有人会否认,旅行文学和传教士关系 —— 通常包含这些交流的摘要,甚至是摘录 —— 是受欢迎的文学体裁,受到受过教育的欧洲人的热切关注。十八世纪阿姆斯特丹或格勒诺布尔的任何一个中产阶级家庭的书架上都可能至少有一本《新法兰西耶稣会关系》(当时法国的北美殖民地),以及一两本由远方的航海家写的报告。这些书之所以受到赞赏,主要是因为它们包含了令人惊讶和前所未有的想法。10
Historians are aware of all this. Yet the overwhelming majority still conclude that even when European authors explicitly say they are borrowing ideas, concepts and arguments from indigenous thinkers, one should not take them seriously. It’s all just supposed to be some kind of misunderstanding, fabrication, or at best a naive projection of pre-existing European ideas. American intellectuals, when they appear in European accounts, are assumed to be mere representatives of some Western archetype of the ‘noble savage’ or sock-puppets, used as plausible alibis to an author who might otherwise get into trouble for presenting subversive ideas (deism, for example, or rational materialism, or unconventional views on marriage).11
历史学家们都知道这一切。然而,绝大多数人仍然得出结论,即使欧洲作者明确说他们是从本土思想家那里借来的思想、概念和论点,人们也不应该认真对待它们。这一切都应该是某种误解、捏造,或者充其量是对欧洲原有思想的天真投射。美洲知识分子,当他们出现在欧洲人的叙述中时,被认为仅仅是一些西方 “高贵的野蛮人” 原型的代表,或者是傀儡,被用作作者的合理借口,否则他可能会因为提出颠覆性思想(例如,神论,或理性唯物主义,或对婚姻的非传统观点)而陷入困境。11
Certainly, if one encounters an argument ascribed to a ‘savage’ in a European text that even remotely resembles anything to be found in Cicero or Erasmus, one is automatically supposed to assume that no ‘savage’ could possibly have really said it – or even that the conversation in question never really took place at all.12 If nothing else, this habit of thought is very convenient for students of Western literature, themselves trained in Cicero and Erasmus, who might otherwise be forced to actually try to learn something about what indigenous people thought about the world, and above all what they made of Europeans.
当然,如果人们在欧洲文本中遇到一个归于 “野蛮人” 的论点,甚至与西塞罗或伊拉斯谟中的论点有一点相似,人们就会自动假定没有 “野蛮人” 可能真的说过这些话 —— 或者甚至假定有关的对话根本就没有发生过。12如果不出意外的话,这种思维习惯对西方文学的学生来说是非常方便的,他们本身就是在西塞罗和伊拉斯谟的训练下长大的,否则他们可能会被迫真正尝试了解一下土著人对世界的看法,尤其是他们对欧洲人的看法。
We intend to proceed in the opposite direction.
我们打算朝着相反的方向前进。
We will examine early missionary and travel accounts from New France – especially the Great Lakes region – since these were the accounts Rousseau himself was most familiar with, to get a sense of what its indigenous inhabitants did actually think of French society, and how they came to think of their own societies differently as a result. We will argue that indigenous Americans did indeed develop a very strong critical view of their invaders’ institutions: a view which focused first on these institutions’ lack of freedom, and only later, as they became more familiar with European social arrangements, on equality.
我们将研究新法国 —— 特别是大湖区 —— 的早期传教士和旅行记录,因为这些记录是卢梭本人最熟悉的,以了解其本土居民对法国社会的实际看法,以及他们如何因此而对自己的社会产生不同的看法。我们将论证,美洲原住民确实对他们的入侵者的机构形成了非常强烈的批评观点:这种观点首先关注的是这些机构缺乏自由,后来随着他们对欧洲社会安排更加熟悉,才开始关注平等。
One of the reasons that missionary and travel literature became so popular in Europe was precisely because it exposed its readers to this kind of criticism, along with providing a sense of social possibility: the knowledge that familiar ways were not the only ways, since – as these books showed – there were clearly societies in existence that did things very differently. We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples. Because it was true.
传教士和旅行文学在欧洲如此受欢迎的原因之一,正是因为它让读者接触到这种批评,同时提供了一种社会可能性的感觉:知道熟悉的方式不是唯一的方式,因为 —— 正如这些书所显示的 —— 显然有一些社会存在着非常不同的做法。我们将建议,为什么这么多关键的启蒙思想家坚持认为他们的个人自由和政治平等的理想是受到美洲本土资源和例子的启发,是有原因的。因为这是事实。
The ‘Age of Reason’ was an age of debate. The Enlightenment was rooted in conversation; it took place largely in cafés and salons. Many classic Enlightenment texts took the form of dialogues; most cultivated an easy, transparent, conversational style clearly inspired by the salon. (It was the Germans, back then, who tended to write in the obscure style for which French intellectuals have since become famous.) Appeal to ‘reason’ was above all a style of argument. The ideals of the French Revolution – liberty, equality and fraternity – took the form they did in the course of just such a long series of debates and conversations. All we’re going to suggest here is that those conversations stretched back further than Enlightenment historians assume.
“理性的时代” 是一个辩论的时代。启蒙运动植根于对话;它主要发生在咖啡馆和沙龙。许多经典的启蒙运动文本都采取了对话的形式;大多数人都培养了一种轻松、透明、对话式的风格,这显然是受到了沙龙的启发。(当时,德国人倾向于用晦涩的风格来写作,而法国知识分子后来也因此而闻名。)对 “理性” 的呼吁首先是一种争论的风格。法国大革命的理想 —— 自由、平等和博爱 —— 就是在这样一长串的辩论和谈话过程中形成的。我们在这里要提出的是,这些对话比启蒙运动的历史学家假设的还要久远。
Let’s begin by asking: what did the inhabitants of New France make of the Europeans who began to arrive on their shores in the sixteenth century?
让我们首先问一下:新法兰西的居民对 16 世纪开始抵达他们海岸的欧洲人有什么看法?
At that time, the region that came to be known as New France was inhabited largely by speakers of Montagnais-Naskapi, Algonkian and Iroquoian languages. Those closer to the coast were fishers, foresters and hunters, though most also practised horticulture; the Wendat (Huron),13 concentrated in major river valleys further inland, growing maize, squash and beans around fortified towns. Interestingly, early French observers attached little importance to such economic distinctions, especially since foraging or farming was, in either case, largely women’s work. The men, they noted, were primarily occupied in hunting and, occasionally, war, which meant they could in a sense be considered natural aristocrats. The idea of the ‘noble savage’ can be traced back to such estimations. Originally, it didn’t refer to nobility of character but simply to the fact that the Indian men concerned themselves with hunting and fighting, which back at home were largely the business of noblemen.
当时,被称为新法兰西的地区主要是由讲 Montagnais-Naskapi、Algonkian 和 Iroquoian 语言的人居住。离海岸较近的人是渔民、林务员和猎人,尽管大多数人也从事园艺工作;温达特人(休伦人)。13集中在内陆的主要河谷,在设防的城镇周围种植玉米、南瓜和豆子。有趣的是,早期的法国观察家并不重视这种经济上的区别,特别是由于在这两种情况下,觅食或耕作基本上都是妇女的工作。他们指出,男人们主要忙于狩猎,偶尔也忙于战争,这意味着他们在某种意义上可以被视为天然的贵族。“高贵的野蛮人” 的概念可以追溯到这种估计。最初,它并不是指性格上的高贵,而只是指印第安人关心自己的狩猎和战斗,而在国内这主要是贵族的事。
But if French assessments of the character of ‘savages’ tended to be decidedly mixed, the indigenous assessment of French character was distinctly less so. Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelize the Algonkian-speaking Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, who had lived for some time next to a French fort. Biard did not think much of the Mi’kmaq, but reported that the feeling was mutual: ‘They consider themselves better than the French: “For,” they say, “you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.” They are saying these and like things continually.’14 What seemed to irritate Biard the most was that the Mi’kmaq would constantly assert that they were, as a result, ‘richer’ than the French. The French had more material possessions, the Mi’kmaq conceded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.
但是,如果说法国人对 “野蛮人” 性格的评价往往是褒贬不一的,那么土著人对法国人性格的评价则明显不那么好。例如,皮埃尔·比亚德(Pierre Biard)神父是一位前神学教授,1608 年被派往新斯科舍省向讲阿尔贡语的米克马克人传教,他们在一个法国堡垒旁边生活了一段时间。比亚德并不看好米克马克人,但他报告说,这种感觉是相互的:“他们认为自己比法国人好:” 因为,“他们说,‘你们总是在相互争斗和争吵;我们却和平地生活。你们嫉妒,总是互相诽谤;你们是小偷和骗子;你们贪婪,既不慷慨也不善良;至于我们,如果我们有一丁点面包,就会与邻居分享。’ 他们不断地说着这些和类似的话。”14最让比亚德恼火的是,米克马克人不断断言,他们因此比法国人 “更富有”。米克马克人承认,法国人拥有更多的物质财富;但他们拥有其他更多的资产:轻松、舒适和时间。
Twenty years later Brother Gabriel Sagard, a Recollect Friar,15 wrote similar things of the Wendat nation. Sagard was at first highly critical of Wendat life, which he described as inherently sinful (he was obsessed with the idea that Wendat women were all intent on seducing him), but by the end of his sojourn he had come to the conclusion their social arrangements were in many ways superior to those at home in France. In the following passages he was clearly echoing Wendat opinion: ‘They have no lawsuits and take little pains to acquire the goods of this life, for which we Christians torment ourselves so much, and for our excessive and insatiable greed in acquiring them we are justly and with reason reproved by their quiet life and tranquil dispositions.’16 Much like Biard’s Mi’kmaq, the Wendat were particularly offended by the French lack of generosity to one another: ‘They reciprocate hospitality and give such assistance to one another that the necessities of all are provided for without there being any indigent beggar in their towns and villages; and they considered it a very bad thing when they heard it said that there were in France a great many of these needy beggars, and thought that this was for lack of charity in us, and blamed us for it severely.’17
20 年后,一位回教修士加布里埃尔·萨加德15对温达特民族写了类似的东西。萨加德起初对温达特人的生活提出了强烈的批评,他认为温达特人的生活本质上是罪恶的(他痴迷于温达特妇女都想勾引他的想法),但在他的旅居结束时,他得出结论,他们的社会安排在许多方面都优于法国国内的安排。在下面的段落中,他显然是在呼应温达特人的观点:“他们没有诉讼,也不怎么费力地获取我们基督徒如此折磨自己的今生之物,而我们在获取这些东西时过度贪婪,他们平静的生活和安宁的性格使我们受到了合理的指责”。16与比亚德的米克马克人一样,温达特人对法国人缺乏相互间的慷慨解囊特别反感:“他们相互款待,相互帮助,以至于所有人的必需品都得到了满足,在他们的城镇和村庄里没有任何贫穷的乞丐;当他们听到有人说法国有很多这样的贫困乞丐时,他们认为这是一件非常糟糕的事情,并认为这是由于我们缺乏慈善,并为此严厉指责我们。17
Wendat cast a similarly jaundiced eye at French habits of conversation. Sagard was surprised and impressed by his hosts’ eloquence and powers of reasoned argument, skills honed by near-daily public discussions of communal affairs; his hosts, in contrast, when they did get to see a group of Frenchmen gathered together, often remarked on the way they seemed to be constantly scrambling over each other and cutting each other off in conversation, employing weak arguments, and overall (or so the subtext seemed to be) not showing themselves to be particularly bright. People who tried to grab the stage, denying others the means to present their arguments, were acting in much the same way as those who grabbed the material means of subsistence and refused to share it; it is hard to avoid the impression that Americans saw the French as existing in a kind of Hobbesian state of ‘war of all against all’. (It’s probably worthy of remark that especially in this early contact period, Americans were likely to have known Europeans largely through missionaries, trappers, merchants and soldiers – that is, groups almost entirely composed of men. There were at first very few French women in the colonies, and fewer children. This probably had the effect of making the competitiveness and lack of mutual care among them seem all the more extreme.)
温达特人对法国人的谈话习惯也投以同样的鄙夷的目光。萨加德对他的主人(就是款待他的温达特人)的口才和论证能力感到惊讶和佩服,这些能力是通过几乎每天公开讨论公共事务而磨练出来的;相反,他的温达特人在看到一群法国人聚集在一起时,经常评论他们在谈话中似乎不断地互相争吵和切断联系,采用薄弱的论据,而且总体上(潜台词似乎是这样)没有显示出他们是特别聪明。那些试图抢占舞台、拒绝他人提出论点的人,其行为方式与那些抢占物质生活资料并拒绝分享的人差不多;很难避免这样的印象,即美洲人认为法国人存在于一种霍布斯式的 “所有人对所有人的战争” 的状态中。(也许值得一提的是,特别是在这个早期接触时期,美洲人可能主要是通过传教士、捕猎者、商人和士兵来了解欧洲人 —— 也就是说,这些群体几乎完全由男性组成。起初,殖民地的法国妇女非常少,儿童也更少。这可能使他们之间的竞争和缺乏相互关怀显得更加极端。)
Sagard’s account of his stay among the Wendat became an influential bestseller in France and across Europe: both Locke and Voltaire cited Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons as a principal source for their descriptions of American societies. The multi-authored and much more extensive Jesuit Relations, which appeared between 1633 and 1673, were also widely read and debated in Europe, and include many a similar remonstrance aimed at the French by Wendat observers. One of the most striking things about these seventy-one volumes of missionary field reports is that neither the Americans, nor their French interlocutors, appear to have had very much to say about ‘equality’ per se – for example, the words égal or égalité barely appear, and on those very few occasions when they do it’s almost always in reference to ‘equality of the sexes’ (something the Jesuits found particularly scandalous).
萨加德关于他在温达特人中逗留的记述,在法国和整个欧洲都成为有影响力的畅销书:洛克和伏尔泰都把《休伦人的大旅行》作为他们描述美洲社会的主要资料。1633 年至 1673 年期间出版的多部著作和更广泛的《耶稣会关系》也在欧洲被广泛阅读和讨论,其中包括许多由温达特观察家针对法国人提出的类似提醒。在这 71 卷传教士实地报告中,最引人注目的一点是,无论是美洲人还是他们的法国对话者,似乎都没有对 “平等” 本身有什么看法 —— 例如,égal 或 égalité 这些词几乎没有出现,而在极少数情况下,它们几乎都是指 “两性平等”(耶稣会士认为这是特别可耻的)。
This appears to be the case, irrespective of whether the Jesuits in question were arguing with the Wendat – who might not seem egalitarian in anthropological terms, since they had formal political offices and a stratum of war captives whom the Jesuits, at least, referred to as ‘slaves’ – or the Mi’kmaq or Montagnais-Naskapi, who were organized into what later anthropologists would consider egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers. Instead, we hear a multiplicity of American voices complaining about the competitiveness and selfishness of the French – and even more, perhaps, about their hostility to freedom.
这似乎是事实,无论有关耶稣会士是在与温达特人争论 —— 从人类学的角度来看,温达特人可能并不平等,因为他们有正式的政治职务和一个被耶稣会士称为 “奴隶” 的战俘阶层 —— 还是米克马克人或蒙塔格奈人·纳斯卡皮人,他们被组织成后来人类学家认为是平等的狩猎·采集者队伍。相反,我们听到许多美洲人抱怨法国人的竞争和自私 —— 甚至更多,也许是抱怨他们对自由的敌视。
That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case. What they differed on was whether or not individual liberty was desirable.
在这些交流中,美洲原住民生活在普遍自由的社会中,而欧洲人则不然,这从来就不是一个真正的辩论问题:双方都同意这是事实。他们的分歧在于,个人自由是否是可取的。
This is one area in which early missionary or travellers’ accounts of the Americas pose a genuine conceptual challenge to most readers today. Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’ observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlier version of ourselves; unlike indigenous Americans, who represent an essentially alien, perhaps even unknowable Other. But in fact, in many ways, the authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty – or even, for that matter, theories of depth psychology18 – indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader’s own than seventeenth-century European ones.
这是早期传教士或旅行者对美洲的描述对今天大多数读者构成真正概念上的挑战的一个领域。我们中的大多数人只是想当然地认为,“西方” 观察者,甚至是 17 世纪的观察者,只是我们自己的早期版本;与美洲本土不同,他们代表着一个本质上陌生的、也许甚至是不可知的他者。但事实上,在许多方面,这些文本的作者与我们完全不同。当涉及到个人自由、男女平等、性道德或人民主权等问题时,甚至在这个问题上,深度心理学的理论也是如此18 —— 美洲本土的态度很可能比 17 世纪的欧洲态度更接近读者自己的态度。
These differing views on individual liberty are especially striking. Nowadays, it’s almost impossible for anyone living in a liberal democracy to say they are against freedom – at least in the abstract (in practice, of course, our ideas are usually much more nuanced). This is one of the lasting legacies of the Enlightenment and of the American and French Revolutions. Personal freedom, we tend to believe, is inherently good (even if some of us also feel that a society based on total individual liberty – one which took it so far as to eliminate police, prisons or any sort of apparatus of coercion – would instantly collapse into violent chaos). Seventeenth-century Jesuits most certainly did not share this assumption. They tended to view individual liberty as animalistic. In 1642, the Jesuit missionary Le Jeune wrote of the Montagnais-Naskapi:
这些关于个人自由的不同观点尤其引人注目。如今,生活在自由主义民主国家的人几乎不可能说他们反对自由 —— 至少在抽象意义上是这样(当然,在实践中,我们的想法通常要细致得多)。这是启蒙运动以及美洲和法国革命的持久遗产之一。我们倾向于相信,个人自由本质上是好的(即使我们中的一些人也觉得,一个基于完全个人自由的社会 —— 一个将其发展到消除警察、监狱或任何形式的强制装置的社会 —— 会立即崩溃,陷入暴力混乱)。十七世纪的耶稣会士当然不同意这种假设。他们倾向于将个人自由视为动物性的。1642 年,耶稣会传教士 Le Jeune 写道:“蒙塔格奈人(Montagnais-Naskapi):
They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages.19
他们认为,根据出生的权利,他们应该享受野驴驹的自由,不向任何人致意,除非他们愿意。他们责备了我一百次,因为我们害怕我们的队长,而他们却嘲笑和取笑他们的队长。他们首领的所有权力都在他的舌头上;因为他只要能说会道,就很有权力;而且,即使他喋喋不休、喋喋不休,也不会被服从,除非他取悦野人。19
In the considered opinion of the Montagnais-Naskapi, however, the French were little better than slaves, living in constant terror of their superiors. Such criticism appears regularly in Jesuit accounts; what’s more, it comes not just from those who lived in nomadic bands, but equally from townsfolk like the Wendat. The missionaries, moreover, were willing to concede that this wasn’t all just rhetoric on the Americans’ part. Even Wendat statesmen couldn’t compel anyone to do anything they didn’t wish to do. As Father Lallemant, whose correspondence provided an initial model for The Jesuit Relations, noted of the Wendat in 1644:
然而,在蒙塔格奈人深思熟虑的观点中,法国人比奴隶好不了多少,一直生活在对上级的恐惧中。这样的批评经常出现在耶稣会的记述中;更重要的是,这种批评不仅来自那些生活在游牧部落的人,也同样来自温达特人等城镇居民。此外,传教士们也愿意承认,这并不全是美洲人的说辞。即使是温达特人的政治家也不能强迫任何人做他们不愿意做的事情。正如拉勒芒神父(他的书信为《耶稣会关系》提供了最初的范本)在 1644 年指出的温达特人。
I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever – so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them. There is no punishment which is inflicted on the guilty, and no criminal who is not sure that his life and property are in no danger … 20
我相信,世界上没有任何一个民族比他们更自由,更不允许他们的意志服从任何权力 —— 以至于这里的父亲对他们的孩子没有控制权,船长对他们的臣民没有控制权,国家的法律对他们中的任何一个都没有控制权,除非每个人都愿意服从它们。没有任何惩罚是施加给有罪的人的,也没有任何罪犯在不确定其生命和财产没有危险的情况下…… 20
Lallemant’s account gives a sense of just how politically challenging some of the material to be found in the Jesuit Relations must have been to European audiences of the time, and why so many found it fascinating. After expanding on how scandalous it was that even murderers should get off scot-free, the good father did admit that, when considered as a means of keeping the peace, the Wendat system of justice was not ineffective. Actually, it worked surprisingly well. Rather than punish culprits, the Wendat insisted the culprit’s entire lineage or clan pay compensation. This made it everyone’s responsibility to keep their kindred under control. ‘It is not the guilty who suffer the penalty,’ Lallemant explains, but rather ‘the public that must make amends for the offences of individuals.’ If a Huron had killed an Algonquin or another Huron, the whole country assembled to agree the number of gifts due to the grieving relatives, ‘to stay the vengeance that they might take’.
拉勒芒的叙述让人感觉到《耶稣会关系》中的一些材料对当时的欧洲观众来说是多么具有政治挑战性,以及为什么这么多人觉得它很吸引人。在阐述了连杀人犯都能逍遥法外是多么可耻之后,这位好父亲承认,如果作为一种维持和平的手段,温达特人的司法系统并非毫无作用。事实上,它的效果出奇地好。温达特人不惩罚罪犯,而是坚持让罪犯的整个家族或宗族进行赔偿。这使得每个人都有责任控制好自己的亲属。拉勒芒解释说:“受惩罚的不是有罪的人,而是 ‘必须为个人的罪行做出补偿的公众’。如果一个休伦人杀死了一个阿尔冈昆人或另一个休伦人,整个国家都会聚集在一起,商定应付给悲伤的亲属的礼物数量,‘以阻止他们可能采取的报复’。”
Wendat ‘captains’, as Lallemant then goes on to describe, ‘urge their subjects to provide what is needed; no one is compelled to it, but those who are willing bring publicly what they wish to contribute; it seems as if they vied with one another according to the amount of their wealth, and as the desire of glory and of appearing solicitous for the public welfare urges them to do on like occasions.’ More remarkable still, he concedes: ‘this form of justice restrains all these peoples, and seems more effectually to repress disorders than the personal punishment of criminals does in France,’ despite being ‘a very mild proceeding, which leaves individuals in such a spirit of liberty that they never submit to any Laws and obey no other impulse than that of their own will’.21
拉勒芒接着描述道,“温达特人的 ‘队长’ 敦促他们的臣民提供所需的东西;没有人被迫这样做,但那些愿意公开提供他们想要的东西的人;似乎他们根据自己财富的多少互相争夺,以及对荣誉的渴望和对公共福利的关心促使他们在类似场合这样做。更难能可贵的是,他承认:“这种司法形式约束了所有这些人,似乎比法国对罪犯的个人惩罚更有效地抑制了混乱”,尽管是 “一种非常温和的程序,它使个人处于一种自由的精神中,他们从不服从任何法律,除了他们自己的意愿外不服从任何其他冲动。”21
There are a number of things worth noting here. One is that it makes clear that some people were indeed considered wealthy. Wendat society was not ‘economically egalitarian’ in that sense. However, there was a difference between what we’d consider economic resources – like land, which was owned by families, worked by women, and whose products were largely disposed of by women’s collectives – and the kind of ‘wealth’ being referred to here, such as wampum (a word applied to strings and belts of beads, manufactured from the shells of Long Island’s quahog clam) or other treasures, which largely existed for political purposes.
这里有许多值得注意的地方。一是它清楚地表明,有些人确实被认为是富有的。温达特社会在这个意义上不是 “经济上的平等主义”。然而,我们所认为的经济资源 —— 如土地,由家庭拥有,由妇女耕作,其,产品主要由妇女集体处理 —— 与这里提到的那种 “财富”,如 “万普姆”,(wampum,适用于珠串和珠带的词,由长岛 quahog 蛤蜊的壳制造)或其他宝物之间是有区别的,它们主要为政治目的存在。
Wealthy Wendat men hoarded such precious things largely to be able to give them away on dramatic occasions like these. Neither in the case of land and agricultural products, nor that of wampum and similar valuables, was there any way to transform access to material resources into power – at least, not the kind of power that might allow one to make others work for you, or compel them to do anything they did not wish to do. At best, the accumulation and adroit distribution of riches might make a man more likely to aspire to political office (to become a ‘chief’ or ‘captain’ – the French sources tend to use these terms in an indiscriminate fashion); but as the Jesuits all continually emphasized, merely holding political office did not give anyone the right to give anybody orders either. Or, to be completely accurate, an office holder could give all the orders he or she liked, but no one was under any particular obligation to follow them.
富裕的温达特人囤积这些珍贵的东西,主要是为了能在这样的戏剧性场合把它们送出去。无论是土地和农产品,还是万普姆和类似的贵重物品,都没有办法将获得的物质资源转化为权力 —— 至少,不是那种可以让人为你工作的权力,或者强迫他们做他们不愿意做的事情。充其量,财富的积累和巧妙分配可能使一个人更有可能渴望获得政治职位(成为 “首领”(chief) 或 “上尉”(captain) —— 法国资料中往往不加区分地使用这些术语);但正如耶稣会士们不断强调的那样,仅仅拥有政治职位也不能使任何人有权利对任何人发号施令。或者,完全准确地说,任职者可以发出他或她喜欢的所有命令,但没有人有任何特别的义务来遵守这些命令。
To the Jesuits, of course, all this was outrageous. In fact, their attitude towards indigenous ideals of liberty is the exact opposite of the attitude most French people or Canadians tend to hold today: that, in principle, freedom is an altogether admirable ideal. Father Lallemant, though, was willing to admit that in practice such a system worked quite well; it created ‘much less disorder than there is in France’ – but, as he noted, the Jesuits were opposed to freedom in principle:
当然,对耶稣会士来说,这一切都很无耻。事实上,他们对本土自由理想的态度与今天大多数法国人或加拿大人倾向于持有的态度完全相反:原则上,自由是一个完全令人钦佩的理想。不过,拉勒芒神父愿意承认,在实践中,这样的制度运行得相当好;它造成的 “混乱比法国要少得多” —— 但正如他所指出的,耶稣会士在原则上反对自由。
This, without doubt, is a disposition quite contrary to the spirit of the Faith, which requires us to submit not only our wills, but our minds, our judgments, and all the sentiments of man to a power unknown to our senses, to a Law that is not of earth, and that is entirely opposed to the laws and sentiments of corrupt nature. Add to this that the laws of the Country, which to them seem most just, attack the purity of the Christian life in a thousand ways, especially as regards their marriages … 22
毫无疑问,这是一种与信仰的精神完全相反的倾向,信仰要求我们不仅要把我们的意志,而且要把我们的思想、判断和人的所有情感服从于一种我们感官所不知道的力量,服从于一种不属于地球的法律,而且与腐败的自然界的法律和情感完全对立。再加上国家的法律,在他们看来是最公正的,却以无数种方式攻击基督徒生活的纯洁性,特别是在他们的婚姻方面…… 22
The Jesuit Relations are full of this sort of thing: scandalized missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried women had sexual liberty and married women could divorce at will. This, for the Jesuits, was an outrage. Such sinful conduct, they believed, was just the extension of a more general principle of freedom, rooted in natural dispositions, which they saw as inherently pernicious. The ‘wicked liberty of the savages’, one insisted, was the single greatest impediment to their ‘submitting to the yoke of the law of God’.23 Even finding terms to translate concepts like ‘lord’, ‘commandment’ or ‘obedience’ into indigenous languages was extremely difficult; explaining the underlying theological concepts, well-nigh impossible.
《耶稣会关系》中充满了这种内容:受到丑化的传教士经常报告说,美洲妇女被认为可以完全控制自己的身体,因此,未婚,妇女有性自由,已婚妇女可以随意离婚。对耶稣会士来说,这就是一种侮辱。他们认为,这种罪恶的行为只是一种更普遍的自由原则的延伸,它植根于自然倾向,而他们认为这种自由本身就是有害的。一个人坚持认为,“野蛮人的邪恶自由” 是阻碍他们 “屈服于上帝律法的枷锁” 的最大障碍。23即使找到术语将 “主”、“诫命” 或 “服从” 等概念翻译成本土语言也非常困难;解释潜在的神学概念则几乎不可能。
In political terms, then, French and Americans were not arguing about equality but about freedom. About the only specific reference to political equality that appears in the seventy-one volumes of The Jesuit Relations occurs almost as an aside, in an account of an event in 1648. It happened in a settlement of Christianized Wendat near the town of Quebec. After a disturbance caused by a shipload of illegal liquor finding its way into the community, the governor persuaded Wendat leaders to agree to a prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and published an edict to that effect – crucially, the governor notes, backed up by threat of punishment. Father Lallemant, again, records the story. For him, this was an epochal event:
在政治方面,法国人和美洲人争论的不是平等而是自由。在《耶稣会关系》的 71 卷书中,关于政治平等的唯一具体描述几乎是作为一个旁观者出现的,是在 1648 年的一个事件的描述中。这件事发生在魁北克镇附近的一个基督教化的温达特人定居点。一船非法酒类进入该社区后引发了一场骚乱,总督说服温达特人领袖同意禁止酒精饮料,并为此发布了一项法令 —— 总督指出,关键是要以惩罚的威胁作为支撑。拉勒芒神父再次记录了这个故事。对他来说,这是一个划时代的事件。
‘From the beginning of the world to the coming of the French, the Savages have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to their people, under any penalty, however slight. They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.’24
从世界之初到法国人的到来,野蛮人从来都不知道什么是庄严地禁止他们的人民做任何事情,无论有多么轻微的惩罚,都是如此。他们是自由的人,每个人都认为自己和其他人一样重要;他们只在自己高兴的情况下服从他们的酋长。24
Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ‘equality before the law’, which is ultimately equality before the sovereign – that is, once again, equality in common subjugation. Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit. The democratic governance of the Wendat and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, which so impressed later European readers, was an expression of the same principle: if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus.
这里的平等是自由的直接延伸;事实上,是自由的表达。它也与更熟悉的 (欧亚)的 “法律面前人人平等” 的概念几乎没有共同之处,后者最终是主权者面前的平等 —— 也就是说,再次是共同征服中的平等。相比之下,美洲人是平等的,因为他们有同样的自由,可以按照自己的意愿服从或不服从命令。给后来的欧洲读者留下深刻印象的温达特人和豪德诺萨尼五族的民主治理,也是同一原则的体现:如果不允许强迫,那么显然,确实存在的这种社会一致性必须通过合理的辩论、有说服力的论证和建立社会共识来创造。
Here we return to the matter with which we began: the European Enlightenment as the apotheosis of the principle of open and rational debate. We’ve already mentioned Sagard’s grudging respect for the Wendat facility in logical argumentation (a theme that also runs through most Jesuit accounts). At this point, it is important to bear in mind that the Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic world. Trained in classical rhetoric and techniques of disputation, Jesuits had learned the Americans’ languages primarily so as to be able to argue with them, to persuade them of the superiority of the Christian faith. Yet they regularly found themselves startled and impressed by the quality of the counterarguments they had to contend with.
在这里,我们又回到了我们开始时的问题:欧洲启蒙运动是公开和理性辩论原则的神化。我们已经提到了萨加德对温达特人的逻辑论证能力的勉强尊重(这个主题也贯穿了大多数耶稣会士的叙述)。在这一点上,重要的是要记住,耶稣会士是天主教世界的知识分子。耶稣会士接受过古典修辞和辩论技巧的训练,他们学习美洲人的语言主要是为了能够与他们争论,说服他们相信基督教信仰的优越性。然而,他们经常发现,他们不得不面对的反驳的质量让他们感到震惊和印象深刻。
How could such rhetorical facility have come to those with no awareness of the works of Varro and Quintilian? In considering the matter, the Jesuits almost always noted the openness with which public affairs were conducted. So, Father Le Jeune, Superior of the Jesuits in Canada in the 1630s: ‘There are almost none of them incapable of conversing or reasoning very well, and in good terms, on matters within their knowledge. The councils, held almost every day in the Villages, and on almost all matters, improve their capacity for talking.’ Or, in Lallemant’s words: ‘I can say in truth that, as regards intelligence, they are in no wise inferior to Europeans and to those who dwell in France. I would never have believed that, without instruction, nature could have supplied a most ready and vigorous eloquence, which I have admired in many Hurons; or more clear-sightedness in public affairs, or a more discreet management in things to which they are accustomed.’25 Some Jesuits went further, remarking – not without a trace of frustration – that New World savages seemed rather cleverer overall than the people they were used to dealing with at home (e.g. ‘they nearly all show more intelligence in their business, speeches, courtesies, intercourse, tricks, and subtleties, than do the shrewdest citizens and merchants in France’).26
对于那些不了解瓦罗和昆体良作品的人来说,这样的修辞手法怎么会出现呢?在考虑这个问题时,耶稣会士们几乎总是注意到公共事务的公开性。因此,1630 年代在加拿大的耶稣会会长勒·朱尼神父说:“在他们的知识范围内,几乎没有人不能很好地交谈或推理,而且是以良好的条件。几乎每天都在村子里举行的会议,以及几乎所有的事情,都提高了他们的谈话能力。或者,用拉勒芒的话说我可以实话实说,就智力而言,他们丝毫不比欧洲人和居住在法国的人逊色。我绝不相信,如果没有教育,自然界可以提供一种最容易和最有力的口才,我在许多休伦人身上看到了这种口才;或者在公共事务上有更清晰的洞察力,或者在他们所习惯的事情上有更谨慎的管理。25一些耶稣会士走得更远,他们不无沮丧地表示,新世界的野蛮人总体上似乎比他们在国内习惯于与之打交道的人更聪明(例如,“他们在 、演讲、礼节、交往、技巧和微妙之处,几乎都比法国最精明的公民和商人表现得更聪明”)。26
Jesuits, then, clearly recognized and acknowledged an intrinsic relation between refusal of arbitrary power, open and inclusive political debate and a taste for reasoned argument. It’s true that Native American political leaders, who in most cases had no means to compel anyone to do anything they had not agreed to do, were famous for their rhetorical powers. Even hardened European generals pursuing genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples often reported themselves reduced to tears by their powers of eloquence. Still, persuasiveness need not take the form of logical argumentation; it can just as easily involve appeal to sentiment, whipping up passions, deploying poetic metaphors, appealing to myth or proverbial wisdom, employing irony and indirection, humour, insult, or appeals to prophecy or revelation; and the degree to which one privileges any of these has everything to do with the rhetorical tradition to which the speaker belongs, and the presumed dispositions of their audience.
那么,耶稣会士清楚地认识到并承认拒绝专断的权力、开放和包容的政治辩论以及对合理论证的喜好之间的内在关系。诚然,美洲原住民的政治领袖,在大多数情况下,没有办法强迫任何人做他们不同意做的事情,但他们的修辞能力却很有名。即使是对原住民进行种族灭绝运动的顽固的欧洲将军也经常报告说,他们的雄辩能力使自己流泪。不过,说服力不需要采取逻辑论证的形式;它也可以很容易地包括诉诸情感、煽动激情、运用诗意的比喻、诉诸神话或谚语的智慧、采用讽刺和暗示、幽默、侮辱或呼吁预言或启示;而其中任何一种特权的程度都与说话者所属的修辞传统和他们的听众的假定倾向有关。
It was largely the speakers of Iroquoian languages such as the Wendat, or the five Haudenosaunee nations to their south, who appear to have placed such weight on reasoned debate – even finding it a form of pleasurable entertainment in own right. This fact alone had major historical repercussions. Because it appears to have been exactly this form of debate – rational, sceptical, empirical, conversational in tone – which before long came to be identified with the European Enlightenment as well. And, just like the Jesuits, Enlightenment thinkers and democratic revolutionaries saw it as intrinsically connected with the rejection of arbitrary authority, particularly that which had long been assumed by the clergy.
主要是讲伊鲁克语的人,如温达特人,或他们南方的五个豪德诺萨尼民族,似乎对理性的辩论如此重视 —— 甚至认为它本身就是一种愉快的娱乐。仅这一事实就产生了重大的历史影响。因为似乎正是这种辩论形式 —— 理性的、怀疑的、经验性的、谈话性的语气 —— 在不久之后也被认定为欧洲启蒙运动。与耶稣会士一样,启蒙运动的思想家和民主革命者认为它与拒绝专制的权威,特别是长期以来由神职人员承担的权威有着内在的联系。
Let’s gather together the strands of our argument so far.
让我们把到目前为止的论证内容集中起来。
By the mid seventeenth century, legal and political thinkers in Europe were beginning to toy with the idea of an egalitarian State of Nature; at least in the minimal sense of a default state that might be shared by societies which they saw as lacking government, writing, religion, private property or other significant means of distinguishing themselves from one another. Terms like ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’ were just beginning to come into common usage in intellectual circles – around the time, indeed, that the first French missionaries set out to evangelize the inhabitants of what are now Nova Scotia and Quebec.27 Europe’s reading public was growing increasingly curious about what such primordial societies might have been like. But they had no particular disposition to imagine men and women living in a State of Nature as especially ‘noble’, let alone as rational sceptics and champions of individual liberty.28 This latter perspective was the product of a dialogic encounter.
到 17 世纪中叶,欧洲的法律和政治思想家们开始玩弄平等主义的自然状态的想法;至少在最小的意义上,他们认为缺乏政府、文字、宗教、私有财产或其他重要的区分彼此的手段的社会可以共享一个默认状态。像 “平等” 和 “不平等” 这样的术语刚刚开始在知识界得到普遍使用 —— 事实上,就是大约在第一批法国传教士开始向现在的新斯科舍和魁北克的居民传教的时候。27欧洲的读书人对这种原始社会可能是什么样子的好奇心越来越强。但他们并不特别倾向于把生活在自然状态下的男人和女人想象得特别 “高贵”,更不用说把他们想象成理性的怀疑论者和个人自由的倡导者。28这后一种观点是对话性接触的产物。
As we’ve seen, at first neither side – not the colonists of New France, nor their indigenous interlocutors – had much to say about ‘equality’. Rather, the argument was about liberty and mutual aid, or what might even be better called freedom and communism. We should be clear about what we mean by the latter term. Since the early nineteenth century, there have been lively debates about whether there was ever a thing that might legitimately be referred to as ‘primitive communism’. At the centre of these debates, almost invariably, were the indigenous societies of the Northeast Woodlands – ever since Friedrich Engels used the Iroquois as a prime example of primitive communism in his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Here, ‘communism’ always refers to communal ownership, particularly of productive resources. As we’ve already observed, many American societies could be considered somewhat ambiguous in this sense: women owned and worked the fields individually, even though they stored and disposed of the products collectively; men owned their own tools and weapons individually, even if they typically shared out the game and spoils.
正如我们所看到的,起初双方 —— 无论是新法兰西的殖民者,还是他们的土著对话者 —— 都没有对 “平等” 有太多的发言权。相反,争论的焦点是自由和互助,或者甚至可以说是自由和共产主义。我们应该清楚地了解后一个术语的含义。自 19 世纪初以来,关于是否有一种东西可以合法地被称为 “原始共产主义”,一直存在着激烈的辩论。这些争论的中心,几乎都是东北林地的原住民社会 —— 自从弗里德里希·恩格斯在他的《家庭、私有财产和国家的起源》(1884)中把易洛魁人作为原始共产主义的主要例子以来。在这里,“共产主义” 总是指公有制,特别是生产资源的公有制。正如我们已经观察到的,许多美洲社会在这个意义上可以被认为是有些模糊的:妇女单独拥有和耕种田地,即使她们集体储存和处理产品;男人单独拥有自己的工具和武器,即使他们通常分享游戏和战利品。
However, there’s another way to use the word ‘communism’: not as a property regime but in the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. There’s also a certain minimal, ‘baseline’ communism which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one’s bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. What varies is just how far it is felt such baseline communism should properly extend.
然而,还有另一种方式来使用 “共产主义” 这个词:不是作为一种财产制度,而是在 “各尽所能,各取所需” 的原始意义上。还有某种最低限度的、适用于所有社会的 “基线” 共产主义;一种感觉是,如果另一个人的需求足够大(例如,他们正在溺水),而满足这些需求的成本足够低(例如,他们要求你扔给他们一根绳子),那么任何正直的人当然会遵守。这种基线共产主义甚至可以被认为是人类社会性的基础,因为只有自己的死敌才不会被这样对待。不同的是,人们认为这种基线共产主义应该适当延伸到什么程度。
In many societies – and American societies of that time appear to have been among them – it would have been quite inconceivable to refuse a request for food. For seventeenth-century Frenchmen in North America, this was clearly not the case: their range of baseline communism appears to have been quite restricted, and did not extend to food and shelter – something which scandalized Americans. But just as we earlier witnessed a confrontation between two very different concepts of equality, here we are ultimately witnessing a clash between very different concepts of individualism. Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies of the Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other. Insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom.
在许多社会中 —— 当时的美洲社会似乎也在其中 —— 拒绝食物要求是相当不可思议的。对于十七世纪在北美的法国人来说,情况显然不是这样的:他们的基线共产主义范围似乎相当有限,并没有延伸到食物和住所 —— 这让美洲人感到羞愧。但是,正如我们先前见证了两种截然不同的平等观念之间的对抗一样,我们在这里最终见证了截然不同的个人主义观念之间的冲突。欧洲人不断地争夺利益;相比之下,东北林地的社会则保证彼此都能过上自主的生活 —— 或者至少保证没有男人或女人从属于任何其他人。就我们可以谈论的共产主义而言,它的存在不是为了反对而是为了支持个人自由。
The same could be said of indigenous political systems that Europeans encountered across much of the Great Lakes region. Everything operated to ensure that no one’s will would be subjugated to that of anyone else. It was only over time, as Americans learned more about Europe, and Europeans began to consider what it would mean to translate American ideals of individual liberty into their own societies, that the term ‘equality’ began to gain ground as a feature of the discourse between them.
欧洲人在大湖区的大部分地区遇到的土著政治制度也是如此。一切运作都是为了确保没有人的意志会屈从于其他人的意志。只是随着时间的推移,随着美洲人对欧洲有了更多的了解,欧洲人也开始考虑将美洲的个人自由理想转化为他们自己的社会意味着什么,“平等” 一词才开始在他们之间的讨论中占据一席之地。
In order to understand how the indigenous critique – that consistent moral and intellectual assault on European society, widely voiced by Native American observers from the seventeenth century onwards – evolved, and its full impact on European thinking, we first need to understand something about the role of two men: an impoverished French aristocrat named Louis-Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de la Hontan, and an unusually brilliant Wendat statesman named Kandiaronk.
为了了解土著人的批判 —— 从 17 世纪起,美洲本土观察家广泛表达的对欧洲社会的一贯道德和思想攻击 —— 是如何演变的,以及它对欧洲思想的全面影响,我们首先需要了解两个人的作用:一个是,名叫路易·阿曼德·洛姆·达尔塞的法国贵族,拉洪坦男爵,另一个是异常出色的温达特政治家坎迪阿伦克。
In 1683, Lahontan (as he came to be known), then seventeen years old, joined the French army and was posted to Canada. Over the course of the next decade he took part in a number of campaigns and exploratory expeditions, eventually attaining the rank of deputy to the Governor-General, the Comte de Frontenac. In the process he became fluent in both Algonkian and Wendat, and – by his own account at least – good friends with a number of indigenous political figures. Lahontan later claimed that, because he was something of a sceptic in religious matters and a political enemy of the Jesuits, these figures were willing to share with him their actual opinions about Christian teachings. One of them was Kandiaronk.
1683 年,时年 17 岁的拉洪坦加入了法国军队并被派往加拿大。在接下来的十年里,他参加了许多战役和探险,最终获得了总督弗朗特纳克伯爵的副手职位。在这个过程中,他精通阿尔冈克语和温达语,而且 —— 至少根据他自己的说法 —— 与一些土著政治人物成了好朋友。拉洪坦后来声称,由于他在宗教问题上是个怀疑论者,而且是耶稣会的政敌,这些人物愿意与他分享他们对基督教教义的实际看法。其中一位是坎迪阿伦克。
A key strategist of the Wendat Confederacy, a coalition of four Iroquoian-speaking peoples, Kandiaronk (his name literally meant ‘the muskrat’ and the French often referred to him simply as ‘Le Rat’) was at that time engaged in a complex geopolitical game, trying to play the English, French and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee off against each other, with the initial aim of averting a disastrous Haudenosaunee assault on the Wendat, but with the long-term goal of creating a comprehensive indigenous alliance to hold off the settler advance.29 Everyone who met him, friend or foe, admitted he was a truly remarkable individual: a courageous warrior, brilliant orator and unusually skilful politician. He was also, to the very end of his life, a staunch opponent of Christianity.30
坎迪阿伦克是温达特联盟(由四个讲伊鲁古语的民族组成的联盟)的关键战略家(他的名字的字面意思是 “麝鼠”,法国人经常把他简单地称为 “老鼠”),当时他正在参与一场复杂的地缘政治游戏。试图让英国人、法国人和豪德诺萨尼五族相互博弈,最初的目的是避免豪德诺萨尼人对温达特的灾难性攻击,但长期目标是建立一个全面的土著联盟,以抵御定居者的入侵。29所有见过他的人,无论是朋友还是敌人,都承认他是一个真正了不起的人:一个勇敢的战士、出色的演说家和异常娴熟的政治家。直到生命的最后一刻,他也是基督教的坚定反对者。30
Lahontan’s own career came to a bad end. Despite having successfully defended Nova Scotia against an English fleet, he ran foul of its governor and was forced to flee French territory. Convicted in absentia of insubordination, he spent most of the next decade in exile, wandering about Europe trying, unsuccessfully, to negotiate a return to his native France. By 1702, Lahontan was living in Amsterdam and very much down on his luck, described by those who met him as penniless vagrant and freelance spy. All that was to change when he published a series of books about his adventures in Canada.
拉洪坦自己的职业生涯也走到了一个糟糕的结局。尽管他成功地保卫了新斯科舍省,抵御了英国舰队的进攻,但他触犯了该省省长,被迫逃离法国领土。在缺席的情况下,他被判定犯有不服从命令罪,在接下来的十年里,他大部分时间都在流亡,在欧洲四处游荡,试图通过谈判返回他的祖国法国,但没有成功。到 1702 年,拉洪丹住在阿姆斯特丹,非常倒霉,遇到他的人都说他是身无分文的流浪汉和自由间谍。当他出版了一系列关于他在加拿大的冒险经历的书籍之后,这一切都将发生变化。
Two were memoirs of his American adventures. The third, entitled Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled (1703), comprised a series of four conversations between Lahontan and Kandiaronk, in which the Wendat sage – voicing opinions based on his own ethnographic observations of Montreal, New York and Paris – casts an extremely critical eye on European mores and ideas about religion, politics, health and sexual life. These books won a wide audience, and before long Lahontan had become something of a minor celebrity. He settled at the court of Hanover, which was also the home base for Leibniz, who befriended and supported him before Lahontan fell ill and died, around 1715.
其中两部是他的美洲冒险回忆录。第三本名为《与一位游历过的有头脑的野人的好奇对话》(1703,以下简称《对话》),由拉洪坦和坎迪阿伦克之间的四次对话组成,其中温达特圣人根据自己对蒙特利尔、纽约和巴黎的人种学观察发表了意见,对欧洲的宗教、政治、健康和性生活的习俗和观念提出了极为尖锐的批评。这些书赢得了广泛的读者,不久之后,拉洪丹就成了一个小名人。他在汉诺威宫廷定居,那里也是莱布尼茨的大本营,莱布尼茨在拉洪丹生病和去世前(大约 1715 年)结识并支持他。
Most criticism of Lahontan’s work simply assumes as a matter of course that the dialogues are made up, and that the arguments attributed to ‘Adario’ (the name given there to Kandiaronk) are the opinions of Lahontan himself.31 In a way, this conclusion is unsurprising. Adario claims not only to have visited France, but expresses opinions on everything from monastic politics to legal affairs. In the debate on religion, he often sounds like an advocate of the deist position that spiritual truth should be sought in reason, not revelation, embracing just the sort of rational scepticism that was becoming popular in Europe’s more daring intellectual circles at the time. It is also true that the style of Lahontan’s dialogues seems partly inspired by the ancient Greek writings of the satirist Lucian; and also that, given the prevalence of Church censorship in France at the time, the easiest way for a freethinker to get away with publishing an open attack on Christianity probably would have been to compose a dialogue pretending to defend the faith from the attacks of an imaginary foreign sceptic – and then make sure one loses all the arguments.
大多数对拉洪丹作品的批评只是理所当然地认为这些对话是编造的,而归于 “阿达里奥”(那里对坎迪阿伦克的称呼)的论点是拉洪丹本人的观点。31在某种程度上,这一结论并不令人惊讶。阿达里奥不仅声称自己访问过法国,而且对从寺院政治到法律事务的一切都发表了意见。在关于宗教的辩论中,他听起来常常像是神论者立场的倡导者,即精神上的真理应该在理性而非启示中寻求,他拥抱的正是当时在欧洲更大胆的知识界开始流行的那种理性的怀疑主义。另外,拉洪丹对话的风格似乎部分受到了古希腊讽刺作家卢西恩作品的启发;而且,鉴于当时法国教会审查制度的盛行,一个自由思想家要想摆脱对基督教的公开攻击,最简单的方法可能是撰写一篇对话,假装为信仰辩护,以抵御一个假想的外国怀疑论者的攻击 —— 然后确保自己输掉所有论点。
In recent decades, however, indigenous scholars returned to the material in light of what we know about Kandiaronk himself – and came to very different conclusions.32 The real-life Adario was famous not only for his eloquence, but was known for engaging in debates with Europeans of just the sort recorded in Lahontan’s book. As Barbara Alice Mann remarks, despite the almost unanimous chorus of Western scholars insisting the dialogues are imaginary, ‘there is excellent reason for accepting them as genuine.’ First, there are the first-hand accounts of Kandiaronk’s oratorical skills and dazzling wit. Father Pierre de Charlevoix described Kandiaronk as so ‘naturally eloquent’ that ‘no one perhaps ever exceeded him in mental capacity.’ An exceptional council speaker, ‘he was not less brilliant in conversation in private, and [councilmen and negotiators] often took pleasure in provoking him to hear his repartees, always animated, full of wit, and generally unanswerable. He was the only man in Canada who was a match for the [governor] Count de Frontenac, who often invited him to his table to give his officers this pleasure.’33
然而,近几十年来,土著学者根据我们对坎迪阿伦克本人的了解,重新研究了这一材料,得出了非常不同的结论。32现实生活中的阿达里奥不仅以其雄辩而闻名,而且以与欧洲人进行拉洪坦书中所记录的那种辩论而闻名。正如芭芭拉·爱丽丝·曼所说,尽管西方学者几乎一致坚持认为这些对话是虚构的,但 “有很好的理由接受它们是真实的。首先,有关于坎迪阿伦克的演说技巧和令人眼花缭乱的智慧的第一手资料。皮埃尔·德·沙勒沃神父形容坎迪阿隆克是如此 “天生的雄辩家,也许没有人在智力方面超过他”。他是一个出色的议会演讲家,“他在私下里的谈话中也同样出色,议员和谈判代表经常以激怒他为乐,听他的答辩,他总是很活跃,充满机智,而且通常无可辩驳。他是加拿大唯一能与总督弗朗特纳克伯爵相提并论的人,弗朗特纳克伯爵经常邀请他到自己的餐桌上,让他的官员们享受这种乐趣。”33
During the 1690s, in other words, the Montreal-based governor and his officers (presumably including his sometime deputy, Lahontan) hosted a proto-Enlightenment salon, where they invited Kandiaronk to debate exactly the sort of matters that appeared in the Dialogues, and in which it was Kandiaronk who took the position of rational sceptic.
换句话说,在 1690 年代,蒙特利尔的总督和他的官员(大概包括他的某个副手拉洪丹)举办了一次原启蒙运动沙龙,他们邀请坎迪阿伦克就《对话》中出现的那种问题进行辩论,而在辩论中,正是坎迪阿伦克采取了理性怀疑者的立场。
What’s more, there is every reason to believe that Kandiaronk actually had been to France; that’s to say, we know the Wendat Confederation did send an ambassador to visit the court of Louis XIV in 1691, and Kandiaronk’s office at the time was Speaker of the Council, which would have made him the logical person to send. While the intimate knowledge of European affairs and understanding of European psychology attributed to Adario might seem implausible, Kandiaronk was a man who had been engaged in political negotiations with Europeans for years, and regularly ran circles around them by anticipating their logic, interests, blind spots and reactions. Finally, many of the critiques of Christianity, and European ways more generally, attributed to Adario correspond almost exactly to criticisms that are documented from other speakers of Iroquoian languages around the same time.34
更重要的是,我们完全有理由相信坎迪阿伦克确实去过法国;也就是说,我们知道温达特联邦确实在 1691 年派了一位大使去访问路易十四的宫廷,而坎迪阿伦克当时的职务是议会议长,这将使他成为派去的合理人选。虽然归因于阿达里奥的对欧洲事务的深入了解和对欧洲心理的理解可能看起来难以置信,但坎迪阿伦克是一个多年来一直从事与欧洲人政治谈判的人,他经常通过预测他们的逻辑、利益、盲点和反应来与他们周旋。最后,许多归咎于阿达里奥的对基督教以及更普遍的欧洲方式的批评,几乎与同一时期其他讲伊鲁瓦语的人所记录的批评完全一致。34
Lahontan himself claimed to have based the Dialogues on notes jotted down during or after a variety of conversations he’d had with Kandiaronk at Michilimackinac, on the strait between Lakes Huron and Michigan; notes that he later reorganized with the governor’s help and which were supplemented, no doubt, by reminiscences both had of similar debates held over Frontenac’s own dinner table. In the process the text was no doubt augmented and embellished, and probably tweaked again when Lahontan produced his final edition in Amsterdam. There is, however, every reason to believe the basic arguments were Kandiaronk’s own.
拉洪丹本人声称,他是根据在休伦湖和密歇根湖之间的密西里马基纳克与坎迪亚龙克进行的各种《对话》期间或之后记下的笔记编写的;他后来在州长的帮助下重新整理了这些笔记,毫无疑问,这些笔记还得到了两人对在弗朗特纳克的餐桌上进行的类似辩论的回忆的补充。在这个过程中,文本无疑得到了扩充和润色,而且当拉洪丹在阿姆斯特丹出版其最终版本时,可能又进行了调整。然而,我们完全有理由相信,基本论点是坎迪阿伦克自己的。
Lahontan anticipates some of these arguments in his Memoirs, when he notes that Americans who had actually been to Europe – here, he was very likely thinking primarily of Kandiaronk himself, as well as a number of former captives who had been put to work as galley slaves – came back contemptuous of European claims to cultural superiority. Those Native Americans who had been in France, he wrote,
拉洪坦在他的《回忆录》中预见到了其中的一些论点,他指出,真正去过欧洲的美洲人 —— 在这里,他很可能主要想到的是坎迪阿伦克本人,以及一些曾被当作船队奴隶的前俘虏 —— 回来后对欧洲人声称的文化优越性感到轻蔑。他写道,那些曾经在法国的美洲原住民。
… were continually teasing us with the faults and disorders they observed in our towns, as being occasioned by money. There’s no point in trying to remonstrate with them about how useful the distinction of property is for the support of society: they make a joke of anything you say on that account. In short, they neither quarrel nor fight, nor slander one another; they scoff at arts and sciences, and laugh at the difference of ranks which is observed with us. They brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the king] who possesses all the power, and is bound by no law but his own will.
…… 他们不断地嘲笑我们,说他们在我们的城镇中观察到的缺点和混乱是由金钱造成的。试图提醒他们财产的区别对社会的支持有多大作用是没有意义的:他们会把你在这方面说的话当作笑话。简而言之,他们既不争吵,也不打架,也不互相诽谤;他们嘲笑艺术和科学,嘲笑我们所看到的等级差异。他们给我们打上奴隶的烙印,称我们是可悲的灵魂,他们的生命不值得拥有,声称我们屈从于一个拥有所有权力的人国王,不受任何法律约束,只受他自己意愿的约束,这使我们感到自卑。
In other words, we find here all the familiar criticisms of European society that the earliest missionaries had to contend with – the squabbling, the lack of mutual aid, the blind submission to authority – but with a new element added in: the organization of private property. Lahontan continues: ‘They think it unaccountable that one man should have more than another, and that the rich should have more respect than the poor. In short, they say, the name of savages, which we bestow upon them, would fit ourselves better, since there is nothing in our actions that bears an appearance of wisdom.’
换句话说,我们在这里发现了最早的传教士不得不面对的对欧洲社会的所有熟悉的批评 —— 争吵、缺乏互助、盲目服从权威 —— 但又加入了一个新元素:私有财产的组织。拉洪坦继续说。“他们认为,一个人比另一个人拥有更多,富人比穷人更受尊重,这是无法解释的。简而言之,他们说,我们赋予他们的野蛮人之名,更适合我们自己,因为我们的行为没有任何智慧的影子。”
Native Americans who had the opportunity to observe French society from up close had come to realize one key difference from their own, one which may not otherwise have been apparent. Whereas in their own societies there was no obvious way to convert wealth into power over others (with the consequence that differences of wealth had little effect on individual freedom), in France the situation could not have been more different. Power over possessions could be directly translated into power over other human beings.
有机会近距离观察法国社会的美洲原住民已经意识到与他们自己社会的一个关键区别,这个区别在其他情况下可能并不明显。在他们自己的社会中,没有明显的方法将财富转化为对他人的权力(其结果是财富的差异对个人自由没有什么影响),而在法国,情况就完全不同了。对财产的权力可以直接转化为对其他人类的权力。
But here let us give the floor to Kandiaronk himself. The first of the Dialogues is about religious matters, in which Lahontan allows his foil calmly to pick apart the logical contradictions and incoherence of the Christian doctrines of original sin and redemption, paying particular attention to the concept of hell. As well as casting doubt on the historicity of scripture, Kandiaronk continually emphasizes the fact that Christians are divided into endless sects, each convinced they are entirely right and that all the others are hell-bound. To give a sense of its flavour:
但在这里,让我们把发言权交给坎迪阿伦克本人。《对话》的第一篇是关于宗教问题的,在这篇对话中,拉洪坦让他的陪衬冷静地挑出逻辑上的矛盾和不连贯之处, 基督教的原罪和救赎学说,特别注意地狱的概念。除了对圣经的历史性表示怀疑外,坎迪阿伦克还不断强调,基督教徒被分成无穷无尽的教派,每个教派都坚信自己是完全正确的,而其他教派都是下地狱的。让我们来感受一下它的味道:
Kandiaronk: Come on, my brother. Don’t get up in arms … It’s only natural for Christians to have faith in the holy scriptures, since, from their infancy, they’ve heard so much of them. Still, it is nothing if not reasonable for those born without such prejudice, such as the Wendats, to examine matters more closely.
坎迪阿伦克:来吧,我的兄弟。不要起哄…… 基督徒对神圣的经文有信心是很自然的,因为从他们的婴儿期开始,他们就听到了很多关于经文的内容。不过,对于那些生来就没有这种偏见的人,如温达特人,更仔细地研究问题,也是无可厚非的。
However, having thought long and hard over the course of a decade about what the Jesuits have told us of the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit, any Wendat could give you twenty reasons against the notion. For myself, I’ve always held that, if it were possible that God had lowered his standards sufficiently to come down to earth, he would have done it in full view of everyone, descending in triumph, with pomp and majesty, and most publicly … He would have gone from nation to nation performing mighty miracles, thus giving everyone the same laws. Then we would all have had exactly the same religion, uniformly spread and equally known throughout the four corners of the world, proving to our descendants, from then till ten thousand years into the future, the truth of this religion. Instead, there are five or six hundred religions, each distinct from the other, of which according to you, the religion of the French, alone, is any good, sainted, or true.35
然而,经过十年来对耶稣会士告诉我们的大神之子的生与死的长时间思考,任何一个温达特人都可以给你二十条理由来反对这种观念。就我自己而言,我一直认为,如果上帝有可能充分降低他的标准下凡,他就会在所有人的注视下这样做,凯旋而降,以最公开的方式进行…… 他将从一个国家走到另一个国家,创造强大的奇迹,从而给每个人同样的法律。然后,我们都会有完全相同的宗教,在世界的四面八方统一传播,同样为人所知,向我们的后代证明,从那时到未来的一万年,这个宗教的真理。相反,现在有五六百种宗教,每一种都与其他宗教不同,按照你的说法,其中只有法国人的宗教是好的、圣洁的或真实的。35
The last passage reflects perhaps Kandiaronk’s most telling point: the extraordinary self-importance of the Jesuit conviction that an all-knowing and all-powerful being would freely choose to entrap himself in flesh and undergo terrible suffering, all for the sake of a single species, designed to be imperfect, only some of which were going to be rescued from damnation anyway.36
最后一段话也许反映了坎迪阿伦克最有说服力的观点:耶稣会的信念是非常自我的,一个全知全能的存在会自由地选择把自己困在肉体中,经历可怕的痛苦,这一切都是为了一个单一的物种,被设计成不完美的,反正其中只有一些会被从诅咒中拯救出来。36
There follows a chapter on the subject of law, where Kandiaronk takes the position that European-style punitive law, like the religious doctrine of eternal damnation, is not necessitated by any inherent corruption of human nature, but rather by a form of social organization that encourages selfish and acquisitive behaviour. Lahontan objects: true, reason is the same for all humans, but the very existence of judges and punishment shows that not everyone is capable of following its dictates:
接下来有一章是关于法律的主题,坎迪阿伦克的立场是,欧洲式的惩罚性法律,就像宗教的永恒诅咒学说一样,并不是因为人类本性的任何内在腐败而必需的,而是因为一种鼓励自私和获取性行为的社会组织形式。拉洪坦反对:的确,理性对所有人类都是一样的,但法官和惩罚的存在本身就表明,不是每个人都能遵循它的指令:
Lahontan : This is why the wicked need to be punished, and the good need to be rewarded. Otherwise, murder, robbery and defamation would spread everywhere, and, in a word, we would become the most miserable people upon the face of the earth.
拉洪坦: 这就是为什么邪恶的人需要被惩罚,而善良的人需要被奖励。否则,谋杀、抢劫和诽谤将到处蔓延,总之,我们将成为地球上最悲惨的人。
Kandiaronk : For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?…
坎迪阿伦克:就我个人而言,我很难看出你怎么会比你现在更悲惨。欧洲人必须是什么样的人,什么样的生物,以至于他们必须被迫行善,而只是因为害怕惩罚而不作恶?
You have observed that we lack judges. What is the reason for that? Well, we never bring lawsuits against one another. And why do we never bring lawsuits? Well, because we made a decision neither to accept or make use of money. And why do we refuse to allow money into our communities? The reason is this: we are determined not to have laws – because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contentedly without them.
你已经观察到我们缺乏法官。那是什么原因呢?嗯,我们从来没有对彼此提起过诉讼。为什么我们从不打官司呢?嗯,因为我们做了一个决定,既不接受也不使用金钱。那为什么我们拒绝让金钱进入我们的社区呢?原因是这样的:我们决心不拥有法律 —— 因为,自从世界是一个世界以来,我们的祖先就能够在没有法律的情况下满足地生活。
Given that the Wendat most certainly did have a legal code, this might seem disingenuous on Kandiaronk’s part. By laws, however, he is clearly referring to laws of a coercive or punitive nature. He goes on to dissect the failings of the French legal system, dwelling particularly on judicial persecution, false testimony, torture, witchcraft accusations and differential justice for rich and poor. In conclusion, he swings back to his original observation: the whole apparatus of trying to force people to behave well would be unnecessary if France did not also maintain a contrary apparatus that encourages people to behave badly. That apparatus consisted of money, property rights and the resultant pursuit of material self-interest:
鉴于温达特人肯定有一部法律法典,这在坎迪阿伦克看来可能是不真诚的。然而,他所说的法律显然是指具有强制或惩罚性质的法律。他继续剖析了法国法律体系的缺陷,特别强调了司法迫害、假证、酷刑、巫术指控和贫富不均的司法。最后,他又回到了他最初的观察:如果法国没有同时维持一个鼓励人们做坏事的相反的机器,那么试图强迫人们表现得好的整个机器是不必要的。这个装置包括金钱、产权和由此产生的对物质自我利益的追求:
Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, – of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?
坎迪阿伦克:我花了六年时间反思欧洲社会的状况,我仍然想不出他们有哪种行为方式不是不人道的,我真心认为这只能是事实,只要你坚持你的 “我的” 和 “你的” 区分。我申明,你们所说的钱是魔鬼中的魔鬼;是法国人的暴君,是所有罪恶的源头;是灵魂的祸害和活人的屠宰场。想象一个人可以生活在金钱的国度里而保存自己的灵魂,就像想象一个人可以在湖底保存自己的生命。金钱是奢侈、淫乱、阴谋、诡计、谎言、背叛、不真诚的父亲,是世界上所有最坏的行为的父亲。父亲卖掉他们的孩子,丈夫卖掉他们的妻子,妻子背叛他们的丈夫,兄弟之间互相残杀,朋友之间虚情假意,而这一切都是因为钱。鉴于这一切,请告诉我,我们温达特人拒绝接触,甚至不看银器,是不对的?
For Europeans in 1703, this was heady stuff.
对于 1703 年的欧洲人来说,这是令人振奋的事情。
Much of the subsequent exchange consists of the Frenchman trying to convince Kandiaronk of the advantages of adopting European civilization, and Kandiaronk countering that the French would do much better to adopt the Wendat way of life. Do you seriously imagine, he says, that I would be happy to live like one of the inhabitants of Paris, to take two hours every morning just to put on my shirt and make-up, to bow and scrape before every obnoxious galoot I meet on the street who happened to have been born with an inheritance? Do you really imagine I could carry a purse full of coins and not immediately hand them over to people who are hungry; that I would carry a sword but not immediately draw it on the first band of thugs I see rounding up the destitute to press them into naval service? If, on the other hand, Lahontan were to adopt an American way of life, Kandiaronk tells him, it might take a while to adjust – but in the end he’d be far happier. (Kandiaronk had a point, as we’ve seen in the last chapter; settlers adopted into indigenous societies almost never wanted to go back.)
随后的交流中,法国人试图说服坎迪阿伦克采用欧洲文明的好处,而坎迪阿伦克则反驳说法国人最好采用温达特的生活方式。他说,你真的想象我很乐意像巴黎的居民一样生活,每天早上花两个小时穿上衬衫和化妆,在街上遇到的每一个碰巧有遗产的讨厌的乡巴佬面前鞠躬道歉?你真的认为我可以带着满满一钱包的硬币,而不立即把它们交给饥饿的人;我可以带着一把剑,而不立即拔出它来对付我看到的第一群围捕赤贫者以迫使他们加入海军的暴徒?另一方面,如果拉洪坦采用美洲的生活方式,坎迪阿伦克告诉他,可能需要一段时间来适应 —— 但最终他会更快乐。(正如我们在上一章中所看到的,坎迪阿伦克说得很有道理;被纳入土著社会的定居者几乎从未想过要回去。)
Kandiaronk is even willing to propose that Europe would be better off if its whole social system was dismantled:
坎迪阿伦克甚至愿意提出,如果欧洲的整个社会体系被拆除,它将会变得更好。
Lahontan: Try for once in your life to actually listen. Can’t you see, my dear friend, that the nations of Europe could not survive without gold and silver – or some similar precious symbol. Without it, nobles, priests, merchants and any number of others who lack the strength to work the soil would simply die of hunger. Our kings would not be kings; what soldiers would we have? Who would work for kings, or anybody else?… It would plunge Europe into chaos and create the most dismal confusion imaginable.
拉洪坦:试着在你的生活中真正听一次。亲爱的朋友,你难道看不出来,如果没有金银 —— 或一些类似的珍贵符号,欧洲的国家就无法生存。没有它,贵族、牧师、商人和任何其他缺乏力量耕种土地的人都会直接饿死。我们的国王不会成为国王;我们会有什么士兵?谁会为国王或其他任何人工作 ?…… 这将使欧洲陷入混乱,并造成可以想象的最令人沮丧的混乱。
Kandiaronk: You honestly think you’re going to sway me by appealing to the needs of nobles, merchants and priests? If you abandoned conceptions of mine and thine, yes, such distinctions between men would dissolve; a levelling equality would then take its place among you as it now does among the Wendat. And yes, for the first thirty years after the banishing of self-interest, no doubt you would indeed see a certain desolation as those who are only qualified to eat, drink, sleep and take pleasure would languish and die. But their progeny would be fit for our way of living. Over and over I have set forth the qualities that we Wendat believe ought to define humanity – wisdom, reason, equity, etc. – and demonstrated that the existence of separate material interests knocks all these on the head. A man motivated by interest cannot be a man of reason.
坎迪阿伦克:你真的认为你会通过呼吁贵族、商人和牧师的需求来动摇我?如果你放弃了我的和你的概念,是的,人与人之间的这种区别就会消失;然后,一种平坦的平等就会在你们中间取代,就像现在在温达特人中间一样。是的,在放逐自我利益之后的头三十年,毫无疑问,你们确实会看到某种荒凉,因为那些只有资格吃喝拉撒的人将会痛苦地死去。但他们的后代会适合我们的生活方式。我一遍又一遍地阐述了我们温达特人认为应该定义人类的品质 —— 智慧、理性、公平等等 —— 并证明了独立的物质利益的存在使所有这些都落空了。一个受利益驱使的人不可能成为一个有理性的人。
Here, finally, ‘equality’ is invoked as a self-conscious ideal – but only as the result of a prolonged confrontation between American and European institutions and values, and as a calculated provocation, turning European civilizing discourse backwards on itself.
在这里,“平等” 终于被援引为一种自觉的理想 —— 但只是作为美洲和欧洲机构和价值观之间长期对抗的结果,以及作为一种精心策划的挑衅,将欧洲的文明话语反过来指向自己。
One reason why modern commentators have found it so easy to dismiss Kandiaronk as the ultimate ‘noble savage’ (and, therefore, as a mere projection of European fantasies) is because many of his assertions are so obviously exaggerated. It’s not really true that the Wendat, or other American societies, had no laws, never quarrelled and knew no inequalities of wealth. At the same time, as we’ve seen, Kandiaronk’s basic line of argument is perfectly consistent with what French missionaries and settlers in North America had been hearing from other indigenous Americans. To argue that because the Dialogues romanticize, they can’t really reflect what he said, is to assume that people are incapable of romanticizing themselves – despite the fact that this is what any skilful debater is likely to do under such circumstances, and all sources concur that Kandiaronk was perhaps the most skilful they’d ever met.
现代评论员之所以发现很容易将坎迪阿伦克作为最终的 “高贵的野蛮人”(因此,仅仅是欧洲人幻想的投射)而加以否定,原因之一是他的许多论断显然是夸大其词。温达特人或其他美洲社会没有法律,从不争吵,不知道财富的不平等,这并不是真的。同时,正如我们所看到的,坎迪阿伦克的基本论点与北美的法国传教士和定居者从其他美洲原住民那里听到的内容完全一致。如果说因为《对话》是浪漫的,所以不能真正反映他所说的内容,那就是假设人们无法将自己浪漫化 —— 尽管在这种情况下,任何有技巧的辩论者都有可能这样做,而且所有消息来源都认为坎迪阿伦克也许是他们所见过的最有技巧的。
Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined the term ‘schismogenesis’ to describe people’s tendency to define themselves against one another.37 Imagine two people getting into an argument about some minor political disagreement but, after an hour, ending up taking positions so intransigent that they find themselves on completely opposite sides of some ideological divide – even taking extreme positions they would never embrace under ordinary circumstances, just to show how much they completely reject the other’s points. They start out as moderate social democrats of slightly different flavours; before a few heated hours are over, one has somehow become a Leninist, the other an advocate of the ideas of Milton Friedman. We know this kind of thing can happen in arguments. Bateson suggested such processes can become institutionalized on a cultural level as well. How, he asked, do boys and girls in Papua New Guinea come to behave so differently, despite the fact that no one ever explicitly instructs them about how boys and girls are supposed to behave? It’s not just by imitating their elders; it’s also because boys and girls each learn to find the behaviour of the opposite sex distasteful and try to be as little like them as possible. What start as minor learned differences become exaggerated until women come to think of themselves as, and then increasingly actually become, everything that men are not. And, of course, men do the same thing towards women.
早在 20 世纪 30 年代,人类学家格雷戈里·贝特森(Gregory Bateson)就创造了 “分裂生成” 这一术语,以描述人们将自己定义为,彼此对立的倾向。37想象一下,两个人因为一些小的政治分歧而发生争论,但在一个小时后,最终采取了如此顽固的立场,以至于他们发现自己处于一些意识形态分歧的完全对立面 —— 甚至采取他们在普通情况下绝不会接受的极端立场,只是为了显示他们完全拒绝对方的观点。他们一开始是口味稍有不同的温和的社会民主党人;在几个激烈的小时结束之前,一个人就莫名其妙地变成了列宁主义者,另一个则是米尔顿·弗里德曼思想的拥护者。我们知道这种事情会在争论中发生。贝特森认为这种过程在文化层面上也会变得制度化。他问道,在巴布亚新几内亚,尽管没有人明确指示他们男孩和女孩应该如何行事,但男孩和女孩的行为是如何变得如此不同的?这不仅仅是通过模仿他们的长辈;还因为男孩和女孩都学会了发现异性的行为令人厌恶,并试图尽可能地不像他们。开始时只是一些微小的学习差异,后来被夸大了,直到女性开始认为自己是,然后越来越多地成为男性所不具备的一切。当然,男人也会对女人做同样的事情。
Bateson was interested in psychological processes within societies, but there’s every reason to believe something similar happens between societies as well. People come to define themselves against their neighbours. Urbanites thus become more urbane, as barbarians become more barbarous. If ‘national character’ can really be said to exist, it can only be as a result of such schismogenetic processes: English people trying to become as little as possible like French, French people as little like Germans, and so on. If nothing else, they will all definitely exaggerate their differences in arguing with one another.
贝特森对社会内部的心理过程感兴趣,但完全有理由相信社会之间也会发生类似的事情。人们会对照他们的邻居来定义自己。城市人因此变得更加城市化,而野蛮人则变得更加野蛮。如果 “民族性格” 真的可以说是存在的,那也只能是这种分裂过程的结果。英国人试图尽可能少地变得像法国人,法国人尽可能少地像德国人,诸如此类。如果不出意外的话,他们在相互争论时肯定都会夸大自己的差异。
In a historical confrontation of civilizations like that taking place along the east coast of North America in the seventeenth century, we can expect to see two contradictory processes. On the one hand, it is only to be expected that people on both sides of the divide will learn from one another and adopt each other’s ideas, habits and technologies (Americans began using European muskets; European settlers began to adopt more indulgent American approaches to disciplining children). At the same time, they will also almost invariably do the opposite, picking out certain points of contrast and exaggerating or idealizing them – eventually even trying to act, in some respects, as little like their new neighbours as possible.
在像十七世纪发生在北美东海岸的历史性文明对抗中,我们可以预期会看到两个矛盾的过程。一方面,可以预料的是,鸿沟两边的人们会相互学习,并采用对方的想法、习惯和技术(美洲人开始使用欧洲的火枪;欧洲定居者开始采用更放纵的美洲人的方法来管教孩子)。 同时,他们也会几乎无一例外地做相反的事情,挑选出某些对比点,并将其夸大或理想化 —— 最终甚至试图在某些方面尽可能地不像他们的新邻居。
Kandiaronk’s focus on money is typical of such situations. To this day, indigenous societies incorporated into the global economy, from Bolivia to Taiwan, almost invariably frame their own traditions, as Marshall Sahlins puts it, by opposition to the white man’s ‘living in the way of money’.38
坎迪阿伦克对金钱的关注是这种情况的典型。时至今日,从玻利维亚到台湾,被纳入全球经济的原住民社会,几乎无一例外地以反对白人 “以钱为生” 的方式来框定自己的传统,正如马歇尔·萨林斯所说的那样。38
All these would be rather trivial concerns had Lahontan’s books not been so successful; but they were to have an enormous impact on European sensibilities. Kandiaronk’s opinions were translated into German, English, Dutch and Italian, and continued in print, in multiple editions, for over a century. Any self-respecting intellectual of the eighteenth century would have been almost certain to have read them. They also inspired a flood of imitations. By 1721, Parisian theatregoers were flocking to Delisle de la Drevetière’s comedy L’Arlequin sauvage: the story of a Wendat brought to France by a young sea captain, featuring a long series of indignant monologues in which the hero ‘attributes the ills of [French] society to private property, to money, and in particular to the monstrous inequality which makes the poor the slaves of the rich’.39 The play was revived almost yearly for the next two decades.40
如果拉洪坦的书不是如此成功,所有这些都是相当微不足道的关注;但它们对欧洲人的感觉产生了巨大的影响。坎迪阿伦克的观点被翻译成德语、英语、荷兰语和意大利语,并以多种版本继续印刷了一个多世纪。十八世纪任何有自尊心的知识分子几乎都会读过这些文章。它们还激发了大量的模仿作品。到 1721 年,巴黎的戏迷们蜂拥而至,观看德莱尔·德雷维埃的喜剧《野蛮的哈雷克》,它讲述了一个被年轻船长带到法国的温达特人的故事,其中有一长串愤怒的独白,主人公 “将法国社会的弊病归咎于私有财产、金钱,尤其是使穷人成为富人奴隶的可怕的不平等”。39在接下来的二十年里,该剧几乎每年都会重演。40
Even more strikingly, just about every major French Enlightenment figure tried their hand at a Lahontan-style critique of their own society, from the perspective of some imagined outsider. Montesquieu chose a Persian; the Marquis d’Argens a Chinese; Diderot a Tahitian; Chateaubriand a Natchez; Voltaire’s L’Ingénu was half Wendat and half French.41 All took up and developed themes and arguments borrowed directly from Kandiaronk, supplemented by lines from other ‘savage critics’ in travellers’ accounts.42 Indeed, a strong case can be made for the real origins of the ‘Western gaze’ – that rational, supposedly objective way of looking at strange and exotic cultures which came to characterize later European anthropology – lying not in travellers’ accounts, but rather in European accounts of precisely these imaginary sceptical natives: gazing inwards, brows furrowed, at the exotic curiosities of Europe itself.
更令人震惊的是,几乎每一个法国启蒙运动的主要人物都试图从一些想象中的外来者的角度对他们自己的社会进行拉洪坦式的批判。孟德斯鸠选择了一个波斯人;阿尔根斯侯爵选择了一个中国人;狄德罗选择了一个塔希提人;夏多布里昂选择了一个纳奇兹人;伏尔泰的《英格努》有一半是温达特人,一半是法国人。41所有的人都接受并发展了直接从坎迪阿伦克那里借来的主题和论点,并辅以旅行者叙述中其他 “野蛮人批评家” 的句子。42事实上,有一个强有力的理由可以证明 “西方目光” 的真正起源 —— 这种理性的、所谓客观的看待陌生和异国文化的方式,成为后来欧洲人类学的特点 —— 不在于旅行者的描述,而在于欧洲人对这些想象中的怀疑论者的描述:向内凝视,眉头紧皱,看着欧洲本身的异国情调。
Perhaps the single most popular work of this genre, published in 1747, was Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess. The book is considered a feminist landmark, in that it may well be the first European novel about a woman which does not end with the protagonist either marrying or dying. Graffigny’s Inca heroine, Zilia, is as critical of the vanities and absurdities of European society as she is of patriarchy. By the nineteenth century, the novel was remembered in some quarters as the first work to introduce the notion of state socialism to the general public, Zilia wondering why the French king, despite levying all sorts of heavy taxes, cannot simply redistribute the wealth in the same manner as the Sapa Inca.43
也许这类作品中最受欢迎的是著名沙龙作家格拉菲尼夫人在 1747 年出版的《一个秘鲁女人的信》,该书通过一个想象中的被绑架的印加公主的眼睛观察法国社会。这本书被认为是一个女权主义的里程碑,因为它很可能是欧洲第一部关于女性的小说,其结局不是以主人公结婚就是死亡而告终。格拉菲尼的印加女主人公齐莉娅对欧洲社会的虚荣和荒唐进行了批判,就像她对父权制的批判一样。到了十九世纪,这部小说在某些方面被认为是向大众介绍国家社会主义概念的第一部作品,齐莉亚想知道为什么法国国王尽管征收了各种重税,却不能像萨帕印加人那样简单地重新分配财富。43
In 1751, preparing a second edition of her book, Madame de Graffigny sent letters to a variety of friends asking for suggested changes. One of these correspondents was a twenty-three-year-old seminary student and budding economist, A. R. J. Turgot, and we happen to have a copy of his reply – which was long and highly (if constructively) critical. Turgot’s text could hardly be more important, since it marks a key moment in his own intellectual development: the point where he began to turn his most lasting contribution to human thought – the idea of material economic progress – into a general theory of history.
1751 年,德·格拉菲尼夫人在准备她的书的第二版时,给许多朋友写信,征求他们的修改意见。其中一位是 23 岁的神学院学生和新晋经济学家杜尔哥,我们碰巧有一份他的回信 —— 很长,而且是高度(如果是建设性的)批评。杜尔哥的文章再重要不过了,因为它标志着他自己思想发展的一个关键时刻:他开始把他对人类思想最持久的贡献 —— 物质经济进步的思想 —— 变成一种一般的历史理论。
The Inca Empire could hardly be described as ‘egalitarian’ – indeed, it was an empire – but Madame de Graffigny represented it as a benevolent despotism; one in which all are ultimately equal before the king. Zilia’s critique of France, like that of all imaginary outsiders writing in the tradition of Kandiaronk, focuses on the lack of individual freedom in French society and its violent inequalities.44 But Turgot found such thinking disturbing, even dangerous.
印加帝国很难被描述为 “平等主义” —— 事实上,它是一个帝国 —— 但德·格拉菲尼夫人把它表现为一个仁慈的专制主义;一个在国王面前最终人人平等的帝国。 齐利亚对法国的批评,就像所有按照坎迪阿伦克的传统写作的假想外来者一样,集中在法国社会缺乏个人自由和暴力的不平等。44但杜尔哥认为这种思想令人不安,甚至是危险的。
Yes, Turgot acknowledged, ‘we all love the idea of freedom and equality’ – in principle. But we must consider a larger context. In reality, he ventured, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority; it’s a sign of inferiority, since it is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient and, therefore, where everyone is equally poor. As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances. Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour. We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilization’, in which the poverty and dispossession of some – however lamentable it may be – is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole.
是的,杜尔哥承认,“我们都喜欢自由和平等的理念” —— 在原则上。但我们必须考虑一个更大的背景。他大胆地说,在现实中,野蛮人的自由和平等并不是他们优越的标志;而是劣等的标志,因为只有在一个每个家庭基本自给自足,因此每个人都同样贫穷的社会中才有可能。杜尔哥推断,随着社会的发展,技术也在不断进步。个人之间的天赋和能力的差异(一直存在)变得更加重要,最终它们形成了越来越复杂的劳动分工的基础。我们从温达特人那样的简单社会发展到我们自己的复杂的 “商业文明”,其中一些人的贫困和被剥夺 —— 无论多么可悲 —— 仍然是整个社会繁荣的必要条件。
There is no avoiding such inequality, concluded Turgot in his reply to Madame de Graffigny. The only alternative, according to him, would be massive, Inca-style state intervention to create a uniformity of social conditions: an enforced equality which could only have the effect of crushing all initiative and, therefore, result in economic and social catastrophe. In light of all this, Turgot suggested Madame de Graffigny rewrite her novel in such a way as to have Zilia realize these terrible implications at the end of the book.
杜尔哥在给格拉菲尼夫人的答复中总结说,这种不平等是无法避免的。他认为,唯一的选择是进行大规模的、印加式的国家干预,以创造统一的社会条件:这种强制的平等只能产生压制所有主动性的效果,因此会导致经济和社会灾难的发生。有鉴于此,杜尔哥建议德·格拉菲尼夫人重写她的小说,让齐利亚在书的结尾处意识到这些可怕的影响。
Unsurprisingly, Graffigny ignored his advice.
不出所料,格拉菲尼没有理会他的建议。
A few years later, Turgot would elaborate these same ideas in a series of lectures on world history. He had already been arguing – for some years – for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization.45 Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are best understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development.
几年后,杜尔哥在一系列关于世界历史的演讲中阐述了这些相同的观点。几年来,他一直在论证技术进步作为整体社会改善的动力的首要地位。在这些讲座中,他将这一论点发展为明确的经济发展阶段理论:他认为,社会进化总是从猎人开始,然后进入牧业阶段,然后是农耕,最后才进入当代的城市商业文明阶段。45那些仍然是猎人、牧人或简单农民的人最好被理解为我们自己以前社会发展阶段的残余。
In this way, theories of social evolution – now so familiar that we rarely dwell on their origins – first came to be articulated in Europe: as a direct response to the power of indigenous critique. Within a few years, Turgot’s breakdown of all societies into four stages was appearing in the lectures of his friend and intellectual ally Adam Smith in Glasgow, and was worked into a general theory of human history by Smith’s colleagues: men like Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson and John Millar. The new paradigm soon began to have a profound effect on how indigenous people were imagined by European thinkers, and by the European public more generally.
以这种方式,社会进化理论 —— 现在是如此熟悉,以至于我们很少纠结于它们的起源 —— 首先在欧洲得到阐述:作为对本土批判力量的直接回应。几年之内,杜尔哥将所有社会划分为四个阶段的观点出现在他的朋友和知识界盟友亚当·斯密在格拉斯哥的演讲中,并被斯密的同事:如卡姆斯勋爵、亚当·弗格森和约翰·米勒等人纳入人类历史的一般理论。这种新的范式很快就开始对欧洲思想家和欧洲公众对土著人的想象产生了深远的影响。
Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food. ‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal parties to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.
以前认为北美社会的生存方式和劳动分工是微不足道的事情,或者充其量是次要的,现在开始认为它们是唯一真正重要的事情。每个人都将根据他们获取食物的主要方式,在同一个宏伟的进化阶梯上被分类。“平等主义” 社会被放逐到这个阶梯的底部,在那里他们最多只能提供一些关于我们遥远的祖先如何生活的见解;但肯定不能再被想象为关于富裕和强大社会的居民在现在应该如何行事的对话中的平等方。
Let’s pause for a moment to take stock. In the years between 1703 and 1751, as we’ve seen, the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought. What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom. As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values – organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves – they reacted in a variety of different ways.
让我们停顿片刻,总结一下。正如我们所看到的,在 1703 年至 1751 年期间,美洲本土对欧洲社会的批评对欧洲思想产生了巨大影响。起初,美洲人(在第一次接触欧洲的风俗习惯时)普遍表达了愤怒和厌恶,通过用从葡萄牙语到俄语等几十种语言进行的无数次对话,最终演变成一场关于权威、体面、社会责任以及最重要的自由性质的辩论。法国观察家们清楚地认识到,大多数美洲土著人将个人自主和行动自由视为完美的价值观 —— 以这样一种方式组织他们自己的生活,以尽量减少一个人服从另一个人的意志的可能性,因此将法国社会视为本质上是一个分裂的奴隶社会 —— 他们以各种不同的方式作出反应。
Some, like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright. Others – settlers, intellectuals and members of the reading public back home – came to see it as a provocative and appealing social proposition. (Their conclusions on this matter, incidentally, bore no particular relation to their feelings about indigenous populations themselves, whom they were often happy to see exterminated – though, in fairness, there were public figures on both sides of the intellectual divide who strongly opposed aggression against foreign peoples.) In fact, the indigenous critique of European institutions was seen as so powerful that anyone objecting to existing intellectual and social arrangements would tend to deploy it as a weapon of choice: a game, as we’ve seen, played by pretty much every one of the great Enlightenment philosophers.
一些人,如耶稣会,直接谴责自由原则。另一些人 —— 定居者、知识分子和家乡的读书人 —— 则将其视为一个具有挑衅性和吸引力的社会主张。(顺带一提,他们在这个问题上的结论与他们对原住民的感受没有特别的关系,他们往往乐于看到原住民被灭绝 —— 尽管公平地说,知识界的两派都有公众人物强烈反对侵略外国人民。)事实上,对欧洲机构的本土批判被认为是如此强大,以至于任何反对现有知识和社会安排的人都倾向于将其作为首选武器来使用:正如我们所看到的,几乎每一位伟大的启蒙哲学家都在玩这个游戏。
In the process – and we’ve seen how this was already happening with Lahontan and Kandiaronk – an argument about freedom also became, increasingly, an argument about equality. Above all, though, all these appeals to the wisdom of ‘savages’ were still ways of challenging the arrogance of received authority: that medieval certainty which maintained that the judgments of the Church and the establishment it upheld, having embraced the correct version of Christianity, were necessarily superior to those of anyone else on earth.
在这个过程中 —— 我们已经看到这在拉洪坦和坎迪阿伦克身上发生的情况 —— 关于自由的争论也越来越成为关于平等的争论。但最重要的是,所有这些对 “野蛮人” 智慧的呼吁仍然是挑战公认权威的傲慢的方式:那种中世纪的确定性,它坚持认为教会的判断和它所维护的机构,在接受了正确的基督教版本后,必然比地球上的任何人都要优越。
Turgot’s case reveals just how much those particular notions of civilization, evolution and progress – which we’ve come to think of as the very core of Enlightenment thought – are, in fact, relative latecomers to that critical tradition. Most importantly, it shows how the development of these notions came in direct response to the power of the indigenous critique. Indeed, it was to take an enormous effort to salvage that very sense of European superiority which Enlightenment thinkers had aimed to upend, unsettle and de-centre. Certainly, over the next century and more, such ideas became a remarkably successful strategy for doing so. But they also created a welter of contradictions: for instance, the peculiar fact that European colonial empires, unlike almost any other in history, were forced to espouse their own ephemerality, claiming to be mere temporary vehicles to speed up their subjects’ march to civilization – at least those subjects who, unlike the Wendat, they hadn’t largely wiped off the map.
杜尔哥的案例揭示了那些特殊的文明、进化和进步的概念 —— 我们已经认为是启蒙思想的核心 —— 实际上是该批判传统的相对后来者。最重要的是,它显示了这些概念的发展是如何直接回应本土批判的力量的。事实上,我们需要付出巨大的努力来挽救欧洲的优越感,而启蒙思想家的目的正是要颠覆、颠覆和去中心化。当然,在接下来的一个多世纪里,这些思想成为了一个非常成功的策略,可以做到这一点。但它们也造成了大量的矛盾:例如,与历史上几乎任何其他帝国不同的是,欧洲殖民帝国被迫支持其自身的短暂性,声称自己只是加速其臣民走向文明的临时工具 —— 至少是那些与温达特人不同的、他们还没有从地图上抹去的臣民。
At this point we find ourselves back full circle with Rousseau.
在这一点上,我们发现自己又回到了卢梭的圈子内。
The exchange between Madame de Graffigny and Turgot gives us a sense of intellectual debate in France in the early 1750s; at least, in the saloniste circles with which Rousseau was familiar. Were freedom and equality universal values, or were they – at least in their pure form – inconsistent with a regime based on private property? Did the progress of arts and sciences lead to improved understanding of the world, and therefore to moral progress as well? Or was the indigenous critique correct, and the wealth and power of France simply a perverse side effect of unnatural, even pathological, social arrangements? These were the questions on every debater’s lips at the time.
格拉菲尼夫人和杜尔哥之间的交流让我们感受到了 1750 年代初法国的知识分子辩论;至少,在卢梭熟悉的沙龙主义圈子里是这样。自由和平等是普世价值吗,还是它们 —— 至少在其纯粹的形式上 —— 与基于私有财产的制度不一致?艺术和科学的进步是否导致了对世界的进一步理解,从而也导致了道德的进步?还是说本土批判是正确的,法国的财富和权力仅仅是不自然的、甚至是病态的社会安排的一个不正常的副作用?这些都是当时每个辩论者口中的问题。
If we know anything about those debates today, it’s largely because of their influence on Rousseau’s essay. The Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality has been taught, debated and picked apart in a thousand classrooms – which is odd, because in many ways it is very much an eccentric outlier, even by the standards of its time.
如果我们今天对这些辩论有所了解,那主要是因为它们对卢梭文章的影响。《关于社会不平等起源的论述》已经在无数课堂上被教授、辩论和挑剔 —— 这很奇怪,因为在许多方面,即使以当时的标准来看,它也是一个非常古怪的异类。
In the early part of his life, Rousseau was known mainly as an aspiring composer. His rise to prominence as a social thinker began in 1750, when he took part in a contest sponsored by the same learned society, the Académie de Dijon, on the question, ‘Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to moral improvement?’46 Rousseau won first prize, and national fame, with an essay in which he argued with great passion that they had not. Our elementary moral intuitions, he asserted, are fundamentally decent and sound; civilization merely corrupts by encouraging us to value form over content. Almost all the examples in this Discourse on the Arts and Sciences are taken from classical Greek and Roman sources – but in his footnotes, Rousseau hints at other sources of inspiration:
在他生命的早期,卢梭主要是作为一个有抱负的作曲家而闻名。他作为社会思想家的崛起始于 1750 年,当时他参加了由同一个学术团体 —— 第戎学院主办的竞赛,题目是:“科学和艺术的恢复是否有助于道德的提高?”46卢梭以一篇文章赢得了一等奖和全国声誉,他在文章中以极大的热情论证了科学和艺术没有贡献。他断言,我们的基本道德直觉从根本上说是正派和健全的;文明只是通过鼓励我们重视形式而不是内容而使之堕落。在这篇《艺术与科学论》中,几乎所有的例子都取自希腊和罗马的古典资料 —— 但在他的脚注中,卢梭暗示了其他的灵感来源。
I don’t dare speak of those happy nations who do not know even the names of the vices which we have such trouble controlling, of those American savages whose simple and natural ways of keeping public order Montaigne does not hesitate to prefer, not merely to the laws of Plato, but even to anything more perfect which philosophy will ever be able to dream up for governing a people. He cites a number of striking examples of these for those who understand how to admire them. What’s more, he says, they don’t wear breeches!47
我不敢说那些幸福的民族,他们甚至不知道我们难以控制的恶习的名称,也不敢说那些美洲的野蛮人,蒙田毫不犹豫地认为他们维持公共秩序的简单而自然的方式,不仅优于柏拉图的法律,甚至优于任何哲学所能梦想出来的治理人民的更完美的东西。他为那些懂得欣赏的人列举了许多引人注目的例子。他说,更重要的是,他们不穿马裤!47
Rousseau’s victory sparked something of a scandal. It was considered controversial, to say the least, for an academy dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences to award top honours to an argument stating that the arts and sciences were entirely counterproductive. As for Rousseau, he spent much of the next several years writing well-publicized responses to criticisms of the piece (as well as using his new fame to produce a comic opera, The Village Soothsayer, which became popular at the French court). When in 1754 the Académie de Dijon announced a new contest on the origins of social inequality, they clearly felt they had to put the upstart in his place.
卢梭的胜利引发了一些丑闻。至少可以说,一个致力于推动艺术和科学发展的学院将最高荣誉授予一个声称艺术和科学完全是反作用的论点,这被认为是有争议的。至于卢梭,在接下来的几年里,他花了很多时间来写一些广为人知的回应,以回应对该作品的批评(同时利用他的新名声制作了一部喜剧歌剧《乡村占卜师》,该剧在法国宫廷很受欢迎)。1754 年,第戎学院宣布就社会不平等的起源进行一次新的竞赛,他们显然认为必须把这个新秀放在自己的位置上。
Rousseau took the bait. He submitted an even more elaborate treatise, clearly designed to shock and confound. Not only did it fail to win the prize (which was bestowed on a very conventional essay by a representative of the religious establishment named the Abbé Talbert, who attributed our current unequal condition largely to original sin), but the judges announced that, since Rousseau’s submission went far over the word limit, they had not even read it all the way through.
卢梭上钩了。他提交了一篇更为详尽的论文,显然是为了让人震惊和困惑。这篇论文不仅没有获奖(获奖者是一位名叫塔尔伯特神父的宗教机构代表,他将我们目前的不平等状况主要归因于原罪,这篇论文非常传统),而且评委们宣布,由于卢梭提交的论文远远超过了字数限制,他们甚至都没有读完。
Rousseau’s essay is undoubtedly odd. It’s also not exactly what it’s often claimed to be. Rousseau does not, in fact, argue that human society begins in a state of idyllic innocence. He argues, rather confusingly, that the first humans were essentially good, but nonetheless systematically avoided one another for fear of violence. As a result, human beings in a State of Nature were solitary creatures, which allows him to make a case that ‘society’ itself – that is, any form of ongoing association between individuals – was necessarily a restraint on human freedom. Even language marked a compromise. But the real innovation Rousseau introduces comes at the key moment of humanity’s ‘fall from grace’, a moment triggered, he argues, by the emergence of property relations.
卢梭的文章无疑是古怪的。它也不完全是它经常声称的那样。事实上,卢梭并没有论证人类社会开始于一种田园诗般的纯真状态。他认为,相当令人困惑的是,最初的人类本质上是好的,但由于害怕暴力而系统地相互回避。因此,自然状态下的人类是孤独的生物,这使他能够证明 “社会” 本身 —— 即个人之间任何形式的持续联系 —— 必然是对人类自由的一种限制。甚至语言也标志着一种妥协。但卢梭引入的真正创新是在人类 “失宠” 的关键时刻,他认为这一时刻是由财产关系的出现引发的。
Rousseau’s model of human society – which, he repeatedly emphasizes, is not meant to be taken literally, but is simply a thought experiment – involves three stages: a purely imaginary State of Nature, when individuals lived in isolation from one another; a stage of Stone Age savagery, which followed the invention of language (in which he includes most of the modern inhabitants of North America and other actually observable ‘savages’); then finally, civilization, which followed the invention of agriculture and metallurgy. Each marks a moral decline. But, as Rousseau is careful to emphasize, the entire parable is a way to understand what made it possible for human beings to accept the notion of private property in the first place:
卢梭的人类社会模型 —— 他反复强调,这并不意味着按字面意思理解,而只是一个思想实验 —— 涉及三个阶段:一个纯粹想象的自然状态,当时个人彼此孤立地生活;一个石器时代的野蛮阶段,在语言发明之后(他把北美的大部分现代居民和其他实际可观察到的 “野蛮人” 包括在其中);最后是文明,在农业和冶金发明之后。每一个都标志着道德的衰退。但是,正如卢梭小心翼翼地强调的那样,整个寓言是一种理解人类首先有可能接受私有财产这一概念的方式。
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘This is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars and murders, how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone, and that the earth itself belongs to no one!’ But it is highly probable that by this time things had reached a point beyond which they could not go on as they were; for the idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which could only have arisen in successive stages, was not formed all at once in the human mind.48
第一个围起一块土地,想说 “这是我的”,并发现人们足够简单地相信他的人,是公民社会的真正创始人。如果有人拉起木桩,填平沟渠,并向他的同胞们喊道:“小心听信这个骗子的话,人类将免于多少犯罪、战争和谋杀,多少痛苦和恐怖。如果你忘记了地球上的果实属于每个人,而地球本身不属于任何人,你就会迷失方向!” 但极有可能的是,这时事情已经到了一个地步,不能再像以前那样发展下去了;因为财产的观念取决于许多先前的观念,而这些观念只能在连续的阶段中产生,并不是一下子在人的头脑中形成的。48
Here, Rousseau asks exactly the same question that puzzled so many indigenous Americans. How is it that Europeans are able to turn wealth into power; turn a mere unequal distribution of material goods – which exists, at least to some degree, in any society – into the ability to tell others what to do, to employ them as servants, workmen or grenadiers, or simply to feel that it was no concern of theirs if they were left dying in a feverish bundle on the street?
在这里,卢梭提出的问题与许多美洲原住民所困惑的问题完全相同。为什么欧洲人能够把财富变成权力;把仅仅是物质产品的不平等分配 —— 至少在某种程度上存在于任何社会 —— 变成对他人指手画脚的能力,把他们雇为仆人、工人或手榴弹兵,或者干脆觉得如果他们被丢在大街上发热捆绑着死去也与他们无关?
While Rousseau does not cite Lahontan or the Jesuit Relations directly, he was clearly familiar with them,49 as any intellectual of the time would have been, and his work is informed by the same critical questions: why are Europeans so competitive? Why do they not share food? Why do they submit themselves to other people’s orders? Rousseau’s long excursus on pitié – the natural sympathy that, he argues, savages have for one another and the quality that holds off the worst depredations of civilization in its second phase – only makes sense in light of the constant indigenous exclamations of dismay to be found in those books: that Europeans just don’t seem to care about each other; that they are ‘neither generous nor kind’.50
虽然卢梭没有直接引用《拉洪丹》或《耶稣会关系》,但他显然对它们很熟悉。49就像当时的任何知识分子一样,他的作品中也有同样的批评问题:为什么欧洲人如此竞争?为什么他们不分享食物?为什么他们要屈从于别人的命令?卢梭关于 “同情” 的长篇论述 —— 他认为, 野蛮人之间的自然同情,以及在第二阶段阻止文明最严重的掠夺的品质 —— 只有在那些书中不断发现的土著人的失望感叹中才有意义:欧洲人似乎并不关心彼此;他们 “既不慷慨也不善良”。50
The reason for the essay’s astonishing success, then, is that for all its sensationalist style, it’s really a kind of clever compromise between two or perhaps even three contradictory positions on the most urgent social and moral concerns of eighteenth-century Europe. It manages to incorporate elements of the indigenous critique, echoes of the biblical narrative of the Fall, and something that at least looks a great deal like the evolutionary stages of material development that were only just being propounded, around that time, by Turgot and Scottish Enlightenment thinkers. Rousseau agrees, in essence, with Kandiaronk’s view that civilized Europeans were, by and large, atrocious creatures, for all the reasons that the Wendat had outlined; and he agrees that property is the root of the problem. The one – major – difference between them is that Rousseau, unlike Kandiaronk, cannot really envisage society being based on anything else.
那么,这篇文章之所以取得了惊人的成功,是因为就其耸人听闻的风格而言,它实际上是一种巧妙的妥协,在两个甚至三个对 18 世纪欧洲最紧迫的社会和道德问题的相互矛盾的立场之间进行妥协。它设法纳入了本土批判的元素,呼应了圣经中关于堕落的叙述,以及一些至少看起来很像物质发展的进化阶段的东西,而这些阶段在当时只是由杜尔哥和苏格兰启蒙思想家提出的。卢梭在本质上同意坎迪阿伦克的观点,即文明的欧洲人大体上是残暴的生物,原因正如温达特人所概述的那样;而且他同意财产是问题的根源。他们之间的一个 —— 主要 —— 区别是,卢梭与坎迪阿伦克不同,不能真正设想社会建立在任何其他基础上。
In translating the indigenous critique into terms that French philosophers could understand, this sense of possibility is precisely what was lost. To Americans like Kandiaronk, there was no contradiction between individual liberty and communism – that’s to say, communism in the sense we’ve been using it here, as a certain presumption of sharing, that people who aren’t actual enemies can be expected to respond to one another’s needs. In the American view, the freedom of the individual was assumed to be premised on a certain level of ‘baseline communism’, since, after all, people who are starving or lack adequate clothes or shelter in a snowstorm are not really free to do much of anything, other than whatever it takes to stay alive.
在将本土批判翻译成法国哲学家可以理解的术语时,这种可能性的感觉恰恰是失去的。对于像坎迪阿伦克这样的美洲人来说,个人自由和共产主义之间并不存在矛盾 —— 也就是说,在我们在这里一直使用的意义上的共产主义,作为某种共享的假设,可以期望不是真正的敌人的人们对彼此的需求做出回应。在美洲人看来,个人的自由被认为是以某种程度的 “基线共产主义” 为前提的,因为,毕竟,在暴风雪中挨饿或缺乏足够的衣服或住所的人,除了为了活命而做的任何事情之外,并没有真正的自由。
The European conception of individual freedom was, by contrast, tied ineluctably to notions of private property. Legally, this association traces back above all to the power of the male household head in ancient Rome, who could do whatever he liked with his chattels and possessions, including his children and slaves.51 In this view, freedom was always defined – at least potentially – as something exercised to the cost of others. What’s more, there was a strong emphasis in ancient Roman (and modern European) law on the self-sufficiency of households; hence, true freedom meant autonomy in the radical sense, not just autonomy of the will, but being in no way dependent on other human beings (except those under one’s direct control). Rousseau, who always insisted he wished to live without being dependent on others’ help (even as he had all his needs attended to by mistresses and servants), played out this very same logic in the conduct of his own life.52
相比之下,欧洲的个人自由概念与私有财产的概念不可避免地联系在一起。在法律上,这种联系首先可以追溯到古罗马男性户主的权力,他可以对他的动产和财产,包括他的孩子和奴隶做任何事情。51在这种观点中,自由总是被定义为 —— 至少是潜在的 —— 以他人为代价行使的东西。更重要的是,在古代,罗马(和现代欧洲)的法律非常强调家庭的自给自足;因此,真正的自由意味着根本意义上的自主,不仅仅是意志的自主,而是绝不依赖其他人类(除了那些在自己直接控制下的人类)。卢梭一直坚持他希望在不依赖他人帮助的情况下生活(即使他的所有需求都由情妇和仆人来满足),在他自己的生活行为中发挥了这种相同的逻辑。52
When our ancestors, Rousseau wrote, made the fatal decision to divide the earth into individually owned plots, creating legal structures to protect their property, then governments to enforce those laws, they imagined they were creating the means to preserve their liberty. In fact, they ‘ran headlong to their chains’. This is a powerful image, but it is unclear what Rousseau felt this lost liberty would actually have looked like; especially if, as he insisted, any ongoing human relationship, even one of mutual aid, is itself a restraint on liberty. It’s hardly surprising that he ends up inventing a purely imaginary age in which each individual wandered alone among the trees; more surprising, perhaps, that his imaginary world has come so often to define the arc of our own horizons. How did this happen?
卢梭写道,当我们的祖先做出致命的决定,将地球划分为个人所有的地块,建立法律结构来保护他们的财产,然后由政府来执行这些法律时,他们想象自己是在创造保护他们自由的手段。事实上,他们 “一头扎进了他们的锁链”。这是一个强有力的形象,但不清楚卢梭认为这种失去的自由实际上是什么样子的;特别是如果像他所坚持的那样,任何持续的人类关系,即使是互助的关系,本身就是对自由的限制。他最后发明了一个纯粹想象的时代,在这个时代里,每个人都在树丛中独自徘徊,这并不令人惊讶;更令人惊讶的是,他的想象中的世界如此频繁地界定了我们自己视野的弧度。这一切是如何发生的?
As we’ve mentioned before, in the wake of the French Revolution conservative critics blamed Rousseau for almost everything. Many held him personally responsible for the guillotine. The dream of restoring the ancient state of liberty and equality, they argued, led to exactly the effects Turgot had predicted: an Inca-style totalitarianism that could only be enforced through revolutionary terror.
正如我们之前提到的,在法国大革命之后,保守的批评家几乎把一切都归咎于卢梭。许多人认为他个人应对断头台负责。他们认为,恢复古代自由和平等状态的梦想恰恰导致了杜尔哥所预言的效果:一个只能通过革命的恐怖来实施的印加式极权主义。
It is true that political radicals at the time of the American and French Revolutions embraced Rousseau’s ideas. Here, for example, is an extract purportedly from a manifesto written in 1776 which almost perfectly reproduces Rousseau’s fusion of evolutionism and critique of private property as leading directly to the origins of the state:
诚然,美洲和法国革命时期的政治激进分子接受了卢梭的思想。例如,这里有一段据称来自 1776 年写的宣言的摘录,它几乎,完美地再现了卢梭把进化论和对私有财产的批判融合在一起,直接导致了国家的起源。
As families multiplied, the means of subsistence began to fail; the nomad (or roaming) life ceased, and PROPERTY started into existence; men chose habitations; agriculture made them intermix. Language became universal; living together, one man began to measure his strength with another, and the weaker were distinguished from the stronger. This undoubtedly created the idea of mutual defence, of one individual governing diverse families reunited, and of thus defending their persons and their fields against the invasion of an enemy; but hence LIBERTY was ruined in its foundation, and EQUALITY disappeared.53
随着家庭的增多,生存手段开始失效;游牧(或漫游)生活停止了,物业开始存在;人们选择居住地;农业使他们相互融合。语言变得普遍;人们生活在一起,一个人开始用另一个人衡量自己的力量,弱者与强者被区分开来。这无疑创造了相互防卫的观念,一个人管理着不同的家庭,从而保护他们的人身和他们的土地免受敌人的入侵;但因此,自由的基础被毁了,平等也消失了。53
These words are drawn from the purported manifesto of the Secret Order of the Illuminati, a network of revolutionary cadres organized within the Freemasons by a Bavarian law professor named Adam Weishaupt. The organization did exist in the late eighteenth century; its purpose was apparently to educate an enlightened international, or even anti-national, elite to work for the restoration of freedom and equality.
这些话摘自据称是光照会的宣言,这是一个由巴伐利亚法律教授亚当·韦肖普特在共济会内组织的革命干部网络。该组织在十八世纪末确实存在;其目的显然是教育一个开明的国际精英,甚至是反国家的精英,为恢复自由和平等而努力。
Conservatives almost immediately denounced the Order, leading to it being banned in 1785, less than ten years after its foundation, but right-wing conspiracists insisted it continued to exist, and that the Illuminati were the hidden hands pulling the strings behind the French Revolution (or later even the Russian). This is silly, but one reason the fantasy was possible is that the Illuminati were perhaps the first to propose that a revolutionary vanguard, trained in the correct interpretation of doctrine, would be able to understand the overall direction of human history – and, therefore, be capable of intervening to speed up its progress.54
保守派几乎立即谴责了这个组织,导致它在 1785 年被取缔,当时它成立还不到 10 年,但右翼阴谋家坚持认为它继续存在,并且认为光照会是法国大革命(甚至后来的俄国大革命)背后拉线的黑手。这很愚蠢,但这种幻想之所以可能,原因之一是,光照会也许是第一个提出在正确解释教义方面受过训练的革命先锋队,能够了解人类历史的总体方向 —— 因此,能够进行干预以加速其进展。54
It may seem ironic that Rousseau, who began his career by taking what we would now consider an arch-conservative position – that seeming progress leads only to moral decay – would end up becoming the supreme bête noire of so many conservatives.55 But a special vitriol is always reserved for traitors.
卢梭的职业生涯开始于我们现在认为是大保守主义的立场 —— 看似进步只会导致道德败坏 —— 最后却成为这么多保守派的头号罪人,这似乎很讽刺。55但是,对叛徒总是有一种特殊的恶意。
Many conservative thinkers see Rousseau as having gone full circle from a promising start to creating what we now think of as the political left. Nor are they entirely wrong in this. Rousseau was indeed a crucial figure in the formation of left-wing thought. One reason intellectual debates of the mid eighteenth century seem so strange to us nowadays is precisely that what we understand as left/right divisions had not yet crystallized. At the time of the American Revolution, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ themselves did not yet exist. A product of the decade immediately following, they originally referred to the respective seating positions of aristocratic and popular factions in the French National Assembly of 1789.
许多保守派思想家认为,卢梭从一个充满希望的开始到创造出我们现在认为的政治左派,走了一个完整的圈子。他们的看法也不完全错误。卢梭的确是左翼思想形成过程中的一个关键人物。十八世纪中叶的知识分子辩论在我们今天看来如此奇怪,原因之一正是我们所理解的左/右之分尚未具体化。在美洲革命的时候,“左” 和 “右” 这两个词本身还不存在。作为紧随其后的十年的产物,它们最初指的是 1789 年法国国民议会中贵族和民众派别各自的座位位置。
Let us emphasize (we really shouldn’t have to) that Rousseau’s effusions on the fundamental decency of human nature and lost ages of freedom and equality were in no sense themselves responsible for the French Revolution. It’s not as if he somehow caused the sans culottes to rise up by putting such ideas into their heads (as we’ve noted, for most of European history intellectuals seem to have been the only class of people who weren’t capable of imagining that other worlds might be brought into being). But we can argue that, in folding together the indigenous critique and the doctrine of progress originally developed to counter it, Rousseau did in fact write the founding document of the left as an intellectual project.
让我们强调一下(我们真的不需要强调),卢梭对人性的基本尊严和失去自由与平等的时代的赞美,从某种意义上说,本身并不对法国大革命负责。他并没有以某种方式将这些思想灌输给无产阶级,从而导致他们起义(正如我们已经注意到的,在欧洲历史的大部分时间里,知识分子似乎是唯一没有能力想象其他世界可能出现的一类人)。但我们可以争辩说,在将本土批判和最初为对抗它而发展的进步学说融合在一起时,卢梭事实上写下了作为知识项目的左派的创始文件。
For the same reason, right-wing thought has from the beginning been suspicious not just about ideas of progress, but also the entire tradition that emerged from the indigenous critique. Today, we assume that it is largely those on the political left who speak about the ‘myth of the noble savage’, and that any early European account that idealizes faraway people, or even attributes to them cogent opinions, is really just a romantic projection of European fantasies on to people the authors could never genuinely understand. The racist denigration of the savage, and naive celebration of savage innocence, are always treated as two sides of the same imperialist coin.56 Yet originally this was an explicitly right-wing position, as explained by Ter Ellingson, the contemporary anthropologist who has reviewed the subject most comprehensively. Ellingson concluded there never was a ‘noble savage’ myth; at least not in the sense of a stereotype of simple societies living in an age of happy primordial innocence. Rather, travellers’ accounts tend to supply a much more ambivalent picture, describing alien societies as a complicated, sometimes (to them) incoherent, mix of virtues and vices. What needs to be investigated, instead, might better be called the ‘myth of the myth of the noble savage’: why is it that certain Europeans began attributing such a naive position to others? The answer isn’t pretty. The phrase ‘noble savage’ was in fact popularized a century or so after Rousseau, as a term of ridicule and abuse. It was deployed by a clique of outright racists, who in 1859 – as the British Empire reached its height of power – took over the British Ethnological Society and called for the extermination of inferior peoples.
出于同样的原因,右翼思想从一开始就不仅怀疑进步的思想,而且怀疑从本土批评中产生的整个传统。今天,我们认为主要是那些政治上的左派在谈论 “高贵的野蛮人的神话”,任何将遥远的民族理想化,甚至将有说服力的观点赋予他们的早期欧洲人的叙述,实际上只是欧洲人的幻想投射到作者永远无法真正理解的人身上的浪漫。对野蛮人的种族主义诋毁和对野蛮人纯真的天真赞美,总是被视为同一枚帝国主义硬币的两面。56然而,这原本是一个明确的右翼立场,正如当代人类学家特尔·埃林森所解释的那样,他最全面地审查了这个问题。埃林森的结论是,从来没有一个 “高贵的野蛮人” 的神话;至少不是生活在快乐的原始纯真时代的简单社会的刻板印象的意义。相反,旅行者的描述倾向于提供一个更加矛盾的画面,将外来社会描述为一个复杂的,有时(对他们来说)不连贯的,美德和恶习的混合体。相反,需要调查的是,最好称之为 “高贵的野蛮人的神话”:为什么某些,欧洲人开始将如此天真的立场归于他人?答案并不美好。事实上,“高贵的野蛮人” 这个短语是在卢梭之后一个多世纪流行起来的,作为一个嘲笑和辱骂的术语。它是由一群彻头彻尾的种族主义者使用的,他们在 1859 年 —— 当大英帝国达到其权力的顶峰时 —— 接管了英国人种学协会,并呼吁灭绝劣等民族。
The original exponents of the idea blamed Rousseau, but before long students of literary history were scouring the archives looking for traces of the ‘noble savage’ everywhere. Almost all the texts discussed in this chapter came under scrutiny; all were dismissed as dangerous, romantic fantasies. At first, however, these dismissals came from the political right. Ellingson makes a particular example of Gilbert Chinard, whose 1913 volume L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (America and the Exotic Dream in French Literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries) was primarily responsible for establishing the notion of the ‘noble savage’ as a Western literary trope in American universities, since he was perhaps the least shy about his political agenda.
这一观点的最初提出者指责卢梭,但不久之后,文学史的学生就开始翻阅档案,到处寻找 “高贵的野蛮人” 的踪迹。本章讨论的几乎所有文本都受到了审查;所有文本都被斥为危险的、浪漫的幻想。然而,一开始,这些否定来自于政治右派。埃林森特别举了吉尔伯特·奇纳德的例子,他在 1913 年出版的《十七和十八世纪法国文学中的美洲和异域之梦》主要负责在美洲大学中确立 “高贵的野蛮人” 的概念,因为他可能是对其政治议程最不忌讳的人。
Citing Lahontan as the key figure in the formation of this notion, Chinard argued that Rousseau borrowed specific arguments either from Lahontan’s Memoirs or his Dialogues with Kandiaronk. In a broader sense, he detects an affinity of temperament:
奇纳德把拉洪丹作为这一概念形成的关键人物,认为卢梭从拉洪丹的《回忆录》或他与坎迪阿伦克的对话中借用了具体的论据。在更广泛的意义上,他发现了一种气质上的亲和力:
It is Jean-Jacques [Rousseau], more than any other author, that the author of the Dialogues with a Savage resembles. With all his faults, his fundamentally ignoble motives, he has put into his style a passion, an enthusiasm which has no equivalent except in the Discourse on Inequality. Like Rousseau, he is an anarchist; like him, he is bereft of moral sensibility, and to a considerably greater degree; like him, he imagines himself to be the prey of persecutions of the human race leagued against himself; like him, he is indignant about the sufferings of the miserable and, even more than him, he throws out the call to arms; and like him, above all, he attributes to property all the evils that we suffer. In this, he permits us to establish a direct connection between the Jesuit missionaries and Jean-Jacques.57
《与野人对话》的作者比任何其他作者都更像让·雅克·卢梭。尽管他有种种缺点,他的动机根本上是不光彩的,但他在自己的风格中注入了一种激情,一种除了在《不平等论》中之外没有其他作品可以比拟的热情。像卢梭一样,他是一个无政府主义者;像他一样,他缺乏道德感,而且程度更深;像他一样,他想象自己是人类联合起来迫害自己的猎物;像他一样,他对悲惨的人的痛苦感到愤慨,甚至比他更多地抛出了武器的召唤;像他一样,最重要的是,他把我们遭受的所有恶行都归于财产。在这一点上,他允许我们在耶稣会传教士和让·雅克之间建立一种直接的联系。57
According to Chinard, even the Jesuits (Lahontan’s ostensible enemies) were ultimately playing the same game of introducing deeply subversive notions through the back door. Their motives in quoting the exasperated observations of their interlocutors were not innocent. Commenting directly on the above passage, Ellingson quite reasonably asks what on earth Chinard is actually talking about here: some kind of anarchist movement perpetrated by Lahontan, the Jesuits and Rousseau? A conspiracy theory to explain the French Revolution? Yes, concludes Ellingson, it almost is. The Jesuits, according to Chinard, have promoted ‘dangerous ideas’ in giving us the impression of the good qualities of ‘savages’, and ‘this impression seems to have been contrary to the interests of the monarchical state and religion.’ In fact, Chinard’s fundamental characterization of Rousseau is as ‘un continuateur des missionaires Jésuites’, and he holds the missionaries responsible for giving rise to ‘the revolutionary spirits [who] would transform our society and, inflamed by reading their relations, bring us back to the state of the American savages’.58
根据奇纳德的说法,即使是耶稣会(拉洪丹的表面敌人)最终也在玩同样的游戏,通过后门引入深颠覆性的概念。他们引用对话者气急败坏的意见的动机并不单纯。在直接评论上述段落时,埃林森很合理地问道,奇纳德在这里究竟在说什么:某种由拉洪丹、耶稣会和卢梭实施的无政府主义运动?一个解释法国大革命的阴谋论?是的,埃林森总结说,这几乎就是。奇纳德认为,耶稣会士在给我们留下 “野蛮人” 的良好品质的印象时,宣传了 “危险的思想”,而 “这种印象似乎与君主制国家和宗教的利益相悖”。事实上,奇纳德对卢梭的基本定性是 ‘un continuateur des missionaires Jésuites’,即,耶稣会传教士的延续者;他认为传教士要对 “催生将改变我们社会的革命精神,并在阅读他们的关系后被激怒,使我们回到美洲野人的状态负责。”58
For Chinard, whether or not European observers were reporting the views of their indigenous interlocutors accurately is irrelevant. For indigenous Americans were, as Chinard puts it, ‘a race different from our own’ with whom no meaningful relation was possible: one might as well, he implies, record the political opinions of a leprechaun.59 What really matters, he emphasizes, are the motives of the white people involved – and these people were clearly malcontents and troublemakers. He accuses one early observer on the customs of the Greenland Inuit of inserting a mix of socialism and ‘illuminism’ into his descriptions – that is, viewing savage customs through a lens that might as well have been borrowed from the Secret Order of the Illuminati.60
对奇纳德来说,欧洲观察员是否准确地报告了他们的土著对话者的观点并不重要。正如奇纳德所说,美洲原住民是 “一个与我们不同的种族”,与他们不可能有任何有意义的关系:他暗示,我们还不如记录一个小妖精的政治观点。59他强调,真正重要的是有关白人的动机 —— 这些人显然是不满者和麻烦制造者。他指责一位研究格陵兰岛因纽特人习俗的早期观察家在他的描述中插入了社会主义和 “光照主义” 的混合物 —— 也就是说,通过一个可能是从光照会的秘密组织中借来的镜头来看待野蛮的习俗。60
This is not the place to document how a right-wing critique morphed into a left-wing critique. To some degree, one can probably just put it down to the laziness of scholars schooled in the history of French or English literature, faced with the prospect of having to seriously engage with what a seventeenth-century Mi’kmaq might have actually been thinking. To say Mi’kmaq thought is unimportant would be racist; to say it’s unknowable because the sources were racist, however, does rather let one off the hook.
这里不是记录右翼批判如何演变成左翼批判的地方。在某种程度上,人们也许可以把它归结为受过法国或英国文学史教育的学者们的懒惰,面对不得不认真,研究一个十七世纪的米克马克人究竟在想什么的前景。如果说米克马克人的思想不重要,那就是种族主义;但如果说因为资料来源是种族主义的,所以它是不可知的,那就相当让人失望。
To some degree, too, such reluctance to engage with indigenous sources is based on completely legitimate protests on the part of those who have, historically, been romanticized. Many have remarked that, to those on the receiving end, being told you are an inferior breed and that therefore anything you say can be ignored, and being told you are an innocent child of nature or the embodiment of ancient wisdom, and that therefore everything you say must be treated as ineffably profound are almost equally annoying. Both attitudes appear designed to prevent any meaningful conversation.
在某种程度上,这种不愿意与原住民接触的态度也是基于那些在历史上被浪漫化的人的完全合理的抗议。许多人说,对那些接受者来说,被告知你是低等民族,因此你说的任何话都可以被忽视,以及被告知你是自然界的无辜孩子或古代智慧的化身,因此你说的一切都必须被视为不可言喻的深刻,几乎同样令人厌恶。这两种态度似乎都是为了阻止任何有意义的对话。
As we noted in our first chapter, when we set out to write this book we imagined ourselves making a contribution to the burgeoning literature on the origins of social inequality – except this time, one based on the actual evidence. As our research proceeded, we came to realize just how strange a question ‘what are the origins of social inequality?’ really was. Quite apart from the implications of primordial innocence, this way of framing the problem suggests a certain diagnosis of what is wrong with society, and what can and can’t be done about it; and as we’ve seen, it often has very little to do with what people living in those societies we’ve come to call ‘egalitarian’ actually feel makes them different from others.
正如我们在第一章中指出的那样,当我们开始写这本书时,我们想象自己为正在兴起的关于社会不平等起源的文献做出了贡献 —— 只不过这一次是基于实际证据的贡献。随着研究的进行,我们逐渐意识到 “社会不平等的起源是什么?” 这个问题真的很奇怪。除了原始纯真的含义之外,这个问题的框架方式暗示了对社会问题的某种诊断,以及可以和不可以做什么;正如我们所看到的,它往往与生活在那些我们称之为 “平等主义” 的社会中的人们实际感觉到的使他们与其他人不同的东西关系不大。
Rousseau sidestepped the question by reducing his savages to mere thought experiments. He was just about the only major figure of the French Enlightenment who didn’t write a dialogue or other imaginative work attempting to look at European society from a foreign point of view. In fact, he strips his ‘savages’ of any imaginative powers of their own; their happiness is entirely derived from their inability to imagine things otherwise, or to project themselves into the future in any way at all.61 They are thus also utterly lacking in philosophy. This is presumably why no one could foresee the disasters that would ensue when they first staked out property and began to form governments to protect it; by the time human beings were even capable of thinking that far ahead, the worst damage had already been done.
卢梭回避了这个问题,把他的野蛮人简化为单纯的思想实验。他是法国启蒙运动中唯一没有写过对话或其他想象力作品的主要人物,他试图从一个外国的角度来看待欧洲社会。事实上,他剥夺了他的 “野蛮人” 自己的任何想象力;他们的幸福完全来自于他们无法想象其他事情,或者以任何方式预测自己的未来。61因此,他们也完全缺乏哲学。这大概就是为什么在他们第一次划定财产并开始组建政府以保护财产时,没有人能够预见到随之而来的灾难;当人类甚至有能力考虑那么远的时候,最严重的破坏已经发生了。
Back in the 1960s, the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres suggested that precisely the opposite was the case. What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they’re actually more imaginative than we are? We find it difficult to picture what a truly free society would be like; perhaps they have no similar trouble picturing what arbitrary power and domination would be like. Perhaps they can not only imagine it, but consciously arrange their society in such a way as to avoid it. As we’ll see in the next chapter, Clastres’s argument has its limits. But by insisting that the people studied by anthropologists are just as self-conscious, just as imaginative, as the anthropologists themselves, he did more to reverse the damage than anyone before or since.
早在 20 世纪 60 年代,法国人类学家皮埃尔·克莱斯特就提出,情况恰恰相反。如果我们喜欢想象的那种简单和无辜的人没有统治者、政府、官僚机构、统治阶级等,不是因为他们缺乏想象力,而是因为他们实际上比我们更有想象力呢?我们发现很难想象一个真正的自由社会会是什么样子;也许他们在想象任意的权力和统治会是什么样子方面没有类似的困难。也许他们不仅能想象,而且有意识地安排他们的社会,以避免它。正如我们将在下一章看到的,克拉斯特里的论点有其局限性。但是,通过坚持认为人类学家所研究的人和人类学家自己一样有自我意识,一样有想象力,他在扭转损害方面做得比以前或以后的任何人都多。
Rousseau has been accused of many crimes. He is innocent of most of them. If there is really a toxic element in his legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the image of the ‘noble savage’, which he didn’t really do, but his promulgation of what we might call the ‘myth of the stupid savage’ – even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity. Nineteenth-century imperialists adopted the stereotype enthusiastically, merely adding on a variety of ostensibly scientific justifications – from Darwinian evolutionism to ‘scientific’ racism – to elaborate on that notion of innocent simplicity, and thus provide a pretext for pushing the remaining free peoples of the world (or increasingly, as European imperial expansion continued, the formerly free peoples) into a conceptual space where their judgements no longer seemed threatening. This is the work we are trying to undo.
卢梭被指控犯有许多罪行。他在大多数情况下是无辜的。如果他的遗产中真的有一个有毒的因素,那就是:不是他对 “高贵的野蛮人” 形象的宣扬,他并没有真正做到这一点,而是他对我们可以称之为 “愚蠢的野蛮人的神话” 的宣扬 —— 即使是他认为在愚蠢的状态下是幸福的。十九世纪的帝国主义者热情地采用了这种刻板印象,只是增加了各种表面上的科学理由 —— 从达尔文的进化论到 “科学” 的种族主义 —— 来阐述这种无辜的简单概念,从而提供了一个借口,把世界上剩余的自由人民(或者随着欧洲帝国扩张的继续,越来越多的前自由人民)推入一个概念空间,使他们的判断不再显得有威胁。这就是我们正试图撤销的工作。
‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ was the rallying cry of the French Revolution.62 Today there are whole disciplines – sub-branches of philosophy and political science and legal studies – which take ‘equality’ as their principal subject matter. Everyone agrees that equality is a value; no one seems to agree on what the term actually refers to. Equality of opportunity? Equality of condition? Formal equality before the law?
“自由、平等、博爱” 是法国大革命的集结号。62今天,有整个学科 —— 哲学、政治学和法律研究的分支 —— 将 “平等” 作为其主要主题。每个人都同意平等是一种价值观;但似乎没有人同意这个词到底指的是什么。机会的平等?条件的平等?法律面前的正式平等?
Similarly, societies like the seventeenth-century Mi’kmaq, Algonkians or Wendat are regularly referred to as ‘egalitarian societies’; or, if not, then as ‘band’ or ‘tribal’ societies, which is usually presumed to mean the same thing. It’s never entirely clear exactly what the term is supposed to refer to. Are we talking about an ideology, the belief that everyone in society should be the same – obviously not in all ways, but in certain respects that are considered particularly important? Or should it be one in which people actually are the same? What might either of these actually mean in practice? That all members of society have equal access to land, or treat each other with equal dignity, or are equally free to make their opinions known in public assemblies; or are we talking about some scale of measurement that can be imposed by the observer: cash income, political power, calorie intake, house size, number and quality of personal possessions?
同样,像十七世纪的米克马克人、阿尔冈克人或温达特人这样的社会也经常被称为 “平等主义社会”;或者,如果,则被称为 “族群” 或 “部落” 社会,这通常被推定为是同一意思。这个词到底指的是什么,从来都不完全清楚。我们谈论的是一种意识形态,即相信社会中的每个人都应该是一样的 —— 显然不是在所有方面,而是在某些被认为特别重要的方面?或者,它应该是一个人们实际上是相同的?这两种情况在实践中可能意味着什么?社会的所有成员都能平等地获得土地,或以平等的尊严对待彼此,或在公共集会中平等地自由发表意见;或者我们在谈论一些可以由观察者强加的衡量尺度:现金收入、政治权力、卡路里摄入量、房屋大小、个人财产的数量和质量?
Would equality mean the effacement of the individual, or the celebration of the individual? (After all, to an outside observer, a society where everyone was exactly the same, and one where they were all so completely different as to preclude any sort of comparison, would seem equally ‘egalitarian’.) Can one speak of equality in a society where elders are treated like gods and make all important decisions, if everyone in that society who survives past, say, fifty will eventually become an elder? What about gender relations? Many societies referred to as ‘egalitarian’ are only really egalitarian between adult men. Sometimes relations between men and women in such societies are anything but equal. At other times things are more ambiguous.
平等是指对个人的抹杀,还是对个人的庆祝?(毕竟,对于一个外部观察者来说,一个每个人都完全相同的社会,和一个他们都完全不同以至于无法进行任何比较的社会,似乎都是同样的 “平等主义”。)在一个长者被视作神明并做出所有重要决定的社会中,如果社会中每一个活过 50 岁的人最终都会成为长者,那么还能说是平等吗?那么性别关系呢?许多被称为 “平等主义” 的社会只是在成年男子之间真正的平等主义。在这样的社会中,有时男女之间的关系是不平等的。在其他时候,事情就比较模糊了。
It may be, for instance, that men and women in a given society are not only expected to perform different sorts of work, but hold different opinions about why work (or what sorts of work) is important in the first place, and therefore feel they have a higher status; or perhaps that their respective roles are so different, it makes no sense to compare them. Many of the societies encountered by the French in North America fit this description. They could be seen as matriarchal from one perspective, patriarchal from another.63 In such cases, can we speak of gender equality? Or would we only be able to do so if men and women were also equal according to some minimal external criterion: being equally free from the threat of domestic violence, for example, or having equal access to resources, or equal say in communal affairs?
例如,在一个特定的社会中,男性和女性不仅被期望从事不同种类的工作,而且对为什么工作(或什么样的工作)首先是重要的持有不同的看法,因此觉得他们有更高的地位;或者也许他们各自的角色是如此不同,比较它们没有意义。法国人在北美洲遇到的许多社会都符合这种描述。从一个角度看,它们可以被视为母系社会,从另一个角度看则是父系社会。63在这种情况下,我们能谈及性别平等吗?或者说,只有在男女在某些最低限度的外部标准上也是平等的情况下,我们才能这样做:例如,平等地不受家庭暴力的威胁,或平等地获得资源,或在社区事务中拥有平等的发言权?
Since there is no clear and generally accepted answer to any of these questions, use of the term ‘egalitarian’ has led to endless arguments. In fact, it remains entirely unclear what ‘egalitarian’ even means. Ultimately the idea is employed not because it has any real analytical substance, but rather for the same reason seventeenth-century natural law theorists speculated about equality in the State of Nature: ‘equality’ is a default term, referring to that kind of protoplasmic mass of humanity one imagines as being left over when all the trappings of civilization are stripped away. ‘Egalitarian’ people are those without princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests, and usually without cities or writing, or preferably even farming. They are societies of equals only in the sense that all the most obvious tokens of inequality are missing.
由于这些问题都没有明确和普遍接受的答案,使用 “平等主义” 一词导致了无尽的争论。事实上,“平等主义” 的含义仍然完全不清楚。归根结底,这个想法被采用并不是因为它有任何真正的分析性内容,而是因为 17 世纪的自然法理论家推测自然状态下的平等:“平等” 是一个默认的术语,指的是那种人们想象中的在所有文明的外衣被剥去后剩下的原生质的人类。“平等主义” 的人是那些没有王子、法官、监督者或世袭祭司的人,通常没有城市或文字,最好甚至没有耕作。他们是平等的社会,只是在所有最明显的不平等标志消失的意义上。
It follows that any historical work which purports to be about the origins of social inequality is really an inquiry into the origins of civilization; one which in turn implies a vision of history like that of Turgot, which conceives ‘civilization’ as a system of social complexity, guaranteeing greater overall prosperity, but at the same time ensuring that certain compromises will necessarily have to be made in the areas of freedom and equality. We will be trying to write a different kind of history, which will also require a different understanding of ‘civilization’.
因此,任何声称是关于社会不平等的起源的历史工作,实际上都是对文明起源的探究;这反过来又意味着像杜尔哥那样的历史观,即把 “文明” 设想为一个社会复杂性的系统,保证更大的整体繁荣,但同时确保在自由和平等方面必然要做出某些妥协。我们将尝试书写一种不同的历史,这也需要对 “文明” 有不同的理解。
To be clear, it’s not that we consider the fact that princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests – or for that matter, writing, cities and farming – only emerge at a certain point in human history to be uninteresting or insignificant. Quite on the contrary: in order to understand our current predicament as a species, it is absolutely crucial to understand how these things first came about. However, we would also insist that, in order to do so, we should reject the impulse to treat our distant ancestors as some sort of primordial human soup. Evidence accumulating from archaeology, anthropology and related fields suggests that – just like seventeenth-century Amerindians and Frenchmen – the people of prehistoric times had very specific ideas about what was important in their societies; that these varied considerably; and that describing such societies as uniformly ‘egalitarian’ tells us almost nothing about them.
明确地说,我们并不是认为王子、法官、监督员或世袭祭司 —— 或者就此而言,文字、城市和农耕 —— 只是在人类历史的某一时刻出现的事实是无趣的或不重要的。恰恰相反:为了理解我们作为一个物种目前所处的困境,理解这些东西最初是如何产生的绝对是至关重要的。然而,我们也会坚持认为,为了做到这一点,我们应该拒绝将我们遥远的祖先视为某种原始人类汤的冲动。从考古学、人类学和相关领域积累的证据表明 —— 就像十七世纪的美洲印第安人和法国人一样 —— 史前时代的人们对他们的社会中什么是重要的有非常具体的想法;这些想法差异很大;把这些社会描述成统一的 “平等主义” 几乎不能说明什么。
No doubt there was usually a degree of equality by default; an assumption that humans are all equally powerless in the face of the gods; or a strong feeling that no one’s will should be permanently subordinated to another’s. Presumably there must have been, if only to ensure that permanent princes, judges, overseers or hereditary priests did not emerge for such long periods of time. But self-conscious ideas of ‘equality’, putting equality forward as an explicit value (as opposed to an ideology of freedom, or dignity, or participation that applies equally to all) appear to have been relative latecomers to human history. And even when they do appear, they rarely apply to everyone.
毫无疑问,通常有一定程度的默认平等;一种,即人类在诸神面前都同样无能为力;或者一种强烈的感觉,即任何人的意志都不应该永久地服从于另一个人的。如果只是为了确保永久的王子、法官、监督者或世袭的祭司不会在如此长的时间内出现,估计肯定是有的。但是自觉的 “平等” 观念,把平等作为一种明确的价值提出来(相对于自由、尊严或平等适用于所有人的参与的意识形态),似乎是人类历史上相对较晚出现的。即使它们出现了,它们也很少适用于所有人。
Ancient Athenian democracy, to take just one example, was based on political equality among its citizens – even if these were only somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent of the overall population – in the sense that each had the same rights to participate in public decision-making. We are taught to see this notion of equal civic participation as a milestone in political development, revived and expanded some 2,000 years later (as it happens, the political systems labelled ‘democracies’ in nineteenth-century Europe had almost nothing to do with ancient Athens, but this is not really the point). What’s more to the point is that Athenian intellectuals at the time, who were mostly of aristocratic background, tended to consider the whole arrangement a tawdry business, and most of them much preferred the government of Sparta, ruled by an even smaller percentage of the total population, who lived collectively off the labours of serfs.
仅举一例,古代雅典的民主是基于公民之间的政治平等 —— 即使这些公民只占总人口的 10% 到 20% 之间 —— 在这个意义上,每个人都有参与公共决策的相同权利。我们被教导将这种平等的公民参与概念视为政治发展的一个里程碑,并在大约 2000 年后得到恢复和扩展(恰好,19 世纪欧洲被称为 “民主” 的政治制度与古雅典几乎毫无关系,但这并不是真正的重点)。更重要的是,当时的雅典知识分子大多具有贵族背景,他们倾向于认为整个安排是一种肮脏的事情,他们中的大多数人更喜欢斯巴达政府,由占总人口比例更小的人统治,他们靠农奴的劳动集体生活。
Spartan citizens, in turn, referred to themselves as the Homoioi, which could be translated either as ‘the Equals’ or ‘Those Who Are All the Same’ – they all underwent the same rigorous military training, adopted the same haughty disdain for both effeminate luxuries and individual idiosyncrasies, ate in communal mess halls and spent most of their lives practising for war.
斯巴达公民则称自己为 Homoioi,可译为 “平等的人” 或 “都一样的人” —— 他们都接受了同样严格的军事训练,对娘娘腔的奢侈品和个人特质都采取了同样傲慢的蔑视态度,在公共食堂吃饭,一生中大部分时间都在为战争进行训练。
This is not, then, a book about the origins of inequality. But it aims to answer many of the same questions in a different way. There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world. A very small percentage of its population do control the fates of almost everyone else, and they are doing it in an increasingly disastrous fashion. To understand how this situation came about, we should trace the problem back to what first made possible the emergence of kings, priests, overseers and judges. But we no longer have the luxury of assuming we already know in advance what the precise answers will turn out to be. Taking guidance from indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, we need to approach the evidence of the human past with fresh eyes.
因此,这不是一本关于不平等的起源的书。但它旨在以一种不同的方式回答许多相同的问题。毫无疑问,这个世界已经出了很大的问题。其人口中的一小部分确实控制着几乎所有其他人的命运,而且他们正以一种日益灾难性的方式进行。为了理解这种情况是如何产生的,我们应该将,追溯到最初使国王、祭司、监督者和法官出现的原因。但是,我们不再奢望假设我们已经预先知道确切的答案是什么。在像拉洪坦这样的本土批评家的指导下,我们需要用新的眼光来对待人类过去的证据。
In and out of chains: the protean possibilities of human politics
Most societies imagine a mythic age of creation. Once upon a time, the story goes, the world was different: fish and birds could talk, animals could turn into humans and humans into animals. It was possible, in such a time, for things to come into being that were entirely new, in a way that cannot really happen any more: fire, or cooking, or the institution of marriage, or the keeping of pets. In these lesser days, we are reduced to endlessly repeating the great gestures of that time: lighting our own particular fires, arranging our own particular marriages, feeding our particular pets – without ever being able to change the world in quite the same way.
大多数社会都想象有一个神话般的创造时代。故事说,在很久以前,世界是不同的:鱼和鸟可以说话,动物可以变成人,人也可以变成动物。在这样一个时代,有可能出现一些全新的东西,而这种情况现在已经不可能发生了:火,或烹饪,或婚姻制度,或饲养的宠物。在这些较小的日子里,我们只能无休止地重复那个时代的伟大姿态:点燃我们自己特定的火,安排我们自己特定的婚姻,喂养我们特定的宠物 —— 但却永远无法以完全相同的方式改变世界。
In some ways, accounts of ‘human origins’ play a similar role for us today as myth did for ancient Greeks or Polynesians, or the Dreamtime for indigenous Australians. This is not to cast aspersions on the scientific rigour or value of these accounts. It is simply to observe that the two fulfil somewhat similar functions. If we think on a scale of, say, the last 3 million years, there actually was an age in which the lines between (what we today think of as) human and animal were still indistinct; and when someone, after all, did have to light a fire, cook a meal or perform a marriage ceremony for the first time. We know these things happened. Still, we really don’t know how. It is very difficult to resist the temptation to make up stories about what might have happened: stories which necessarily reflect our own fears, desires, obsessions and concerns. As a result, such distant times can become a vast canvas for the working out of our collective fantasies.
在某些方面,关于 “人类起源” 的描述对今天的我们起到了类似于神话对古希腊人或波利尼西亚人的作用,或者说对澳大利亚土著人的梦幻时间。这并不是要对这些说法的科学严谨性或价值进行诽谤。这只是为了观察这两种说法在某种程度上履行了类似的功能。如果我们以过去 300 万年的规模来考虑,实际上有一个时代,(我们今天所认为的)人类和动物之间的界限仍然模糊不清;而且,毕竟有人第一次点火、做饭或举行结婚仪式。我们知道这些事情发生了。不过,我们真的不知道是怎么发生的。我们很难抵制诱惑,去编造可能发生的故事:这些故事必然反映出我们自己的恐惧、欲望、执着和担忧。因此,这种遥远的时代可以成为我们集体幻想的巨大画布。
This canvas of human prehistory is distinctively modern. The renowned theorist of culture W. J. T. Mitchell once remarked that dinosaurs are the quintessential modernist animal, since in Shakespeare’s time no one knew such creatures had ever existed. In a similar way, until quite recently most Christians assumed anything worth knowing about early humans could be found in the Book of Genesis. Up until the early years of the nineteenth century, ‘men of letters’ – scientists included – still largely assumed that the universe did not even exist prior to late October, 4004 BC, and that all humans spoke the same language (Hebrew) until the dispersal of humanity, after the fall of the Tower of Babel sixteen centuries later.1
这幅人类史前史的画卷具有鲜明的现代性。著名的文化理论家米歇尔曾经说过,恐龙是典型的现代主义动物,因为在莎士比亚的时代没有人知道这种生物曾经存在过。同样,直到最近,大多数基督徒认为关于早期人类的任何值得了解的东西都可以在《创世纪》中找到。直到 19 世纪初,“文人” —— 包括科学家 —— 仍然在很大程度上假设宇宙在公元前 4004 年 10 月末之前根本不存在,所有人类都说同一种语言(希伯来语),直到 16 个世纪后巴别塔倒塌后人类的分散。1
At that time there was as yet no ‘prehistory’. There was only history, even if some of that history was wildly wrong. The term ‘prehistory’ only came into common use after the discoveries at Brixham Cave in Devon in 1858, when stone axes, which could only have been fashioned by humans, were found alongside remains of cave bear, woolly rhinoceros and other extinct species, all together under a sealed casing of rock. This, and subsequent archaeological findings, sparked a complete rethinking of existing evidence. Suddenly, ‘the bottom dropped out of human history.’2
在那个时候,还没有 “史前”。只有历史,即使其中有些历史是错误的。1858 年,在德文郡的布里克汉姆洞发现了只有人类才能制造的石斧,以及洞熊、毛犀牛和其他已灭绝物种的遗骸,这些遗骸都在一个密封的岩石外壳下,“史前” 一词才被普遍使用。这一点以及随后的考古发现,引发了对现有证据的彻底反思。突然间,“人类历史的底部掉了下来。”2
The problem is that prehistory turns out to be an extremely long period of time: more than 3 million years, during which we know our ancestors were, at least sometimes, using stone tools. For most of this period, evidence is extremely limited. There are phases of literally thousands of years for which the only evidence of hominin activity we possess is a single tooth, and perhaps a handful of pieces of shaped flint. While the technology we are capable of bringing to bear on such remote periods improves dramatically each decade, there’s only so much you can do with sparse material. As a result, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to fill in the gaps, to claim we know more than we really do. When scientists do this the results often bear a suspicious resemblance to those very biblical narratives modern science is supposed to have cast aside.
问题是,史前史原来是一个极其漫长的时期:超过 300 万年,在此期间,我们知道我们的祖先至少有时使用石器。在这一时期的大部分时间里,证据是极其有限的。有几千年的阶段,我们拥有的人类活动的唯一证据是一颗牙齿,也许还有几块成型的燧石。虽然我们有能力对这些遥远的时期进行研究的技术每十年都有很大的提高,但对于稀少的材料,你能做的只有这么多。因此,我们很难抵制填补空白的诱惑,声称我们知道的比实际情况多。当科学家这样做的时候,其结果往往与那些现代科学应该抛弃的圣经叙事有着可疑的相似之处。
Let’s take just one example. Back in the 1980s, there was a great deal of buzz about a ‘mitochondrial Eve’, the putative common ancestor of our entire species. Granted, no one was claiming to have actually found the physical remains of such an ancestor; but sequencing the DNA in mitochondria – the tiny cell-motors we inherit from our mothers – demonstrated that such an Eve must have existed, perhaps as recently as 120,000 years ago. And while no one imagined we’d ever find Eve herself, the discovery of a variety of other fossil skulls rescued from the East African Rift Valley (a natural ‘preservation trap’ for Palaeolithic remains, long since swept to oblivion in more exposed settings) seemed to provide a suggestion as to what Eve might have looked like and where she might have lived. While scientists continued debating the ins and outs, popular magazines were soon carrying stories about a modern counterpart to the Garden of Eden, the original incubator of humanity, the savannah-womb that gave life to us all.
让我们只举一个例子。早在 20 世纪 80 年代,关于 “线粒体夏娃”,即我们整个物种的假定共同祖先,就有了很大的争议。诚然,没有人声称真的找到了这样一个祖先的物理遗迹;但是对线粒体 —— 我们从母亲那里继承的微小的细胞动力 —— 中的 DNA 测序表明,这样一个夏娃一定存在过,也许,就在 12 万年前。虽然没有人想到我们会找到夏娃本人,但从东非大裂谷(旧石器时代遗骸的天然 “保存陷阱”,在更多暴露的环境中早已被扫除殆尽)发现的各种其他头骨化石似乎提供了一个建议,即夏娃可能是什么样子,她可能生活在哪里。当科学家们继续争论这些问题时,流行杂志很快就刊登了关于伊甸园的现代对应物的故事,伊甸园是人类最初的孵化器,是给予我们所有人生命的大草原子宫。
Many of us probably still have something resembling this picture of human origins in our mind. More recent research, though, has shown it couldn’t possibly be accurate. In fact, biological anthropologists and geneticists are now converging on an entirely different picture. Rather than everyone starting out the same, then dispersing from East Africa in some Tower-of-Babel moment to become the diverse nations and peoples of the earth, early human populations in Africa appear to have been far more physically diverse than anything we are familiar with today.
我们中的许多人可能在脑海中仍有一些类似于人类起源的画面。然而,最近的研究表明,这不可能是准确的。事实上,生物人类学家和遗传学家现在正趋向于一个完全不同的画面。与其说每个人一开始都是一样的,然后在某个巴别塔时刻从东非分散开来,成为地球上不同的国家和民族,不如说非洲的早期人类人口似乎比我们今天所熟悉的任何东西都更具有生理多样性。
We modern-day humans tend to exaggerate our differences. The results of such exaggeration are often catastrophic. Between war, slavery, imperialism and sheer day-to-day racist oppression, the last several centuries have seen so much human suffering justified by minor differences in human appearance that we can easily forget just how minor these differences really are. By any biologically meaningful standard, living humans are barely distinguishable. Whether you go to Bosnia, Japan, Rwanda or the Baffin Islands, you can expect to see people with the same small and gracile faces, chin, globular skull and roughly the same distribution of body hair. Not only do we look the same, in many ways we act the same as well (for instance, everywhere from the Australian outback to Amazonia, rolling one’s eyes is a way of saying ‘what an idiot!’). The same applies to cognition. We might think different groups of humans realize their cognitive capacities in very different ways – and to some extent, of course, we do – but again, much of this perceived difference results from our having no real basis for comparison: there’s no human language, for instance, that doesn’t have nouns, verbs and adjectives; and while humans may enjoy very different forms of music and dance, there’s no known human population that does not enjoy music and dancing at all.
我们现代人倾向于夸大我们的差异。这种夸大的结果往往是灾难性的。在战争、奴隶制、帝国主义和纯粹的日常种族主义压迫之间,在过去的几个世纪里,有如此多的人类痛苦被人类外表的微小差异所证明,以至于我们很容易忘记这些差异到底有多小。根据任何有生物学意义的标准,活着的人类几乎没有区别。无论你是去波斯尼亚、日本、卢旺达还是巴芬群岛,你都会看到人们有着相同的小而优雅的脸、下巴、球状头骨和大致相同的体毛分布。我们不仅长相相同,在许多方面我们的行为也相同(例如,从澳大利亚内陆到亚马逊地区,翻白眼是说 ‘真是个白痴!’ 的一种方式)。这同样适用于认知。我们可能认为不同的人类群体以非常不同的方式实现他们的认知能力 —— 当然,在某种程度上,我们确实如此 —— 但同样,这种感知的差异大部分是由于我们没有真正的比较基础:例如,没有人类语言没有名词、动词和形容词;虽然人类可能喜欢非常不同形式的音乐和舞蹈,但没有已知的人类群体根本不喜欢音乐和舞蹈。
Rewind a few hundred millennia and all this was most definitely not the case.
倒退几百个千年,这一切绝对不是事实。
For most of our evolutionary history, we did indeed live in Africa – but not just the eastern savannahs, as previously thought: our biological ancestors were distributed everywhere from Morocco to the Cape.3 Some of those populations remained isolated from each another for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years, cut off from their nearest relatives by deserts and rainforests. Strong regional traits developed.4 The result probably would have struck a modern observer as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past. Those elements that make up modern humans – the relatively uniform ‘us’ referred to above – seem only to have come together quite late in the process. In other words, if we think humans are different from each other now, it’s largely illusory; and even such differences as do exist are utterly trivial and cosmetic, compared with what must have been happening in Africa during most of prehistory.
在我们进化史的大部分时间里,我们确实生活在非洲 —— 但并不像以前认为的那样只生活在东部大草原上:我们的生物祖先分布在从摩洛哥到海角的所有地方。3其中一些种群在几万年甚至几十万年的时间里一直相互隔离,被沙漠和雨林切断了与最近亲属的联系。形成了强烈的区域特征。4其结果可能会让现代的观察者感到更像是一个由霍比特人、巨人和精灵居住的世界,而不是我们今天或更近的过去所直接经历的东西。构成现代人类的那些元素 —— 上面提到的相对统一的 “我们” —— 似乎只是在这个过程中很晚才走到一起。换句话说,如果我们认为现在的人类彼此不同,那在很大程度上是虚幻的;即使存在这样的差异,与史前大部分时间里在非洲发生的事情相比,也完全是微不足道和表面现象。
Ancestral humans were not only quite different from each other; they also coexisted with smaller-brained, more ape-like species such as Homo naledi . What were these ancestral societies like? At this point, at least, we should be honest and admit that, for the most part, we don’t have the slightest idea. There’s only so much you can reconstruct from cranial remains and the occasional piece of knapped flint – which is basically all we have. Most of the time we don’t even really know what was going on below the neck, let alone with pigmentation, diet or anything else. What we do know is that we are composite products of this original mosaic of human populations, which interacted with one another, interbred, drifted apart and came together mostly in ways we can still only guess at.5 It seems reasonable to assume that behaviours like mating and child-rearing practices, the presence or absence of dominance hierarchies or forms of language and proto-language must have varied at least as much as physical types, and probably far more.
祖先人类不仅彼此之间有很大的不同;他们还与大脑更小、更像猿猴的物种共存,如 Homo naledi。这些祖先的社会是什么样的?至少在这一点上,我们应该诚实地承认,在大多数情况下,我们没有丝毫的想法。你只能从头盖骨的遗骸和偶尔出现的一块打碎的燧石中重建很多东西 —— 这基本上就是我们所拥有的一切。大多数时候,我们甚至不知道脖子以下的情况,更不用说色素、饮食或其他方面了。我们所知道的是,我们是这种原始的人类种群马赛克的综合产物,这些种群相互作用,相互交配,渐行渐远,并以我们仍然只能猜测的方式走到一起。5似乎可以合理地假设,像交配和养育孩子的做法、统治等级的存在与否、语言和原语言的形式等行为的变化至少与身体类型一样多,甚至可能多得多。
Perhaps the only thing we can say with real certainty is that, in terms of ancestry, we are all Africans.
也许我们唯一可以真正肯定的是,从血统上看,我们都是非洲人。
Modern humans first appeared in Africa. When they began expanding out of Africa into Eurasia, they encountered other populations such as Neanderthals and Denisovans – less different, but still different – and these various groups interbred.6 Only after those other populations became extinct can we really begin talking about a single, human ‘us’ inhabiting the planet. What all this brings home is just how radically different the social and even physical world of our remote ancestors would have seemed to us – and this would have been true at least down to around 40,000 BC . The range of flora and fauna surrounding them was quite unlike anything that exists today. All of which makes it extremely difficult to draw analogies. There’s simply nothing in the historical or ethnographic record that resembles a situation in which different subspecies of human interbred, interacted, co-operated, but sometimes also killed each other – and even if there were, the archaeological evidence is too thin and sporadic to test whether remote prehistory was really anything like that or not.7
现代人最早出现在非洲。当他们开始从非洲向欧亚大陆扩张时,他们遇到了其他人群,如尼安德特人和丹尼索瓦人 —— 差异较小,但仍有,这些不同的群体进行了交配。6只有在这些其他种群灭绝之后,我们才能真正开始谈论居住在地球上的单一的人类 “我们”。这一切让我们认识到,在我们看来,我们遥远的祖先的社会甚至物质世界是多么的不同 —— 这至少在公元前 4 万年左右是如此。他们周围的植物和动物的范围与今天的情况完全不同。所有这些都使我们极难进行类比。在历史或人种学记录中,根本没有任何东西类似于不同亚种的人类杂交、互动、合作,但有时也互相残杀的情况 —— 即使有,考古学证据也太单薄和零星,无法检验遥远的史前史是否真的像那样。7
The only thing we can reasonably infer about social organization among our earliest ancestors is that it’s likely to have been extraordinarily diverse. Early humans inhabited a wide range of natural environments, from coastlands and tropical forest to mountains and savannah. They were far, far more physically diverse than humans are today; and presumably their social differences were even greater than their physical ones. In other words, there is no ‘original’ form of human society. Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making, whether the resultant myths take the form of ‘killer ape’ fantasies that emerged in the 1960s, seared into collective consciousness by movies like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; or the ‘aquatic ape’; or even the highly amusing but fanciful ‘stoned ape’ (the theory that consciousness emerged from the accidental ingestion of psychedelic mushrooms). Myths like these entertain YouTube watchers to this day.
关于我们最早的祖先的社会组织,我们唯一可以合理推断的是,它可能是非常多样化的。早期人类居住在广泛的自然环境中,从海岸和热带森林到山区和大草原。他们在身体上的差异比今天的人类要大得多;而且据推测,他们的社会差异甚至比身体差异更大。换句话说,不存在人类社会的 “原始” 形式。寻找一个原始社会只能是一个制造神话的问题,无论由此产生的神话是否采取 20 世纪 60 年代出现的 “杀人猿” 幻想的形式,这些幻想被斯坦利·库布里克的《2001:太空漫游》等电影烙印在集体意识中;或 “水生猿”;甚至是非常有趣但令人遐想的 “醉猿”(关于意识产生于意外摄入迷幻蘑菇的理论)。像这样的神话至今还在娱乐着 YouTube 的观众。
We should be clear: there’s nothing wrong with myths. Likely as not, the tendency to make up stories about the distant past as a way of reflecting on the nature of our species is itself, like art and poetry, one of those distinctly human traits that began to crystallize in deep prehistory. And no doubt some of these stories – for instance, feminist theories that see distinctly human sociability as originating in collective child-rearing practices – can indeed tell us something important about the paths that converged in modern humanity.8 But such insights can only ever be partial because there was no Garden of Eden, and a single Eve never existed.
我们应该清楚:神话没有任何问题。很可能的是,编造关于遥远的过去的故事作为反思我们物种本质的一种方式,这种倾向本身就像艺术和诗歌一样,是那些在史前深处开始结晶的明显的人类特征之一。毫无疑问,这些故事中的一些 —— 例如,将明显的人类社会性视为起源于集体育儿实践的女权主义理论 —— 确实可以告诉我们一些关于汇聚在现代人类中的路径的重要信息。8但这样的洞察力只能是部分的,因为没有伊甸园,也没有一个夏娃存在过。
Human beings, today, are a fairly uniform species. This uniformity is not, in evolutionary terms, particularly old. Its genetic basis was established around half a million years ago, but it is almost certainly misguided to think we could ever specify a single, more recent point in time when Homo sapiens ‘emerged’ – that is, when all the various elements of the modern human condition converged, definitively, in some stupendous moment of creation.
今天,人类是一个相当统一的物种。从进化的角度来看,这种统一性并不特别古老。它的遗传基础是在 50 万年前建立的,但如果认为我们可以明确指出一个更近的时间点,即智人 “出现” 的时间点,也就是说,现代人类状况的所有元素在某个巨大的创造时刻明确地汇聚在一起,那几乎肯定是误导。
Consider the first direct evidence of what we’d now call complex symbolic human behaviour, or simply ‘culture’. Currently, it dates back no more than 100,000 years. Where exactly on the African continent this evidence for culture crops up is determined largely by conditions of preservation, and by the countries that have so far been most accessible for archaeological investigation. Rock shelters around the coastlands of South Africa are a key source, trapping prehistoric sediments that yield evidence of hafted tools and the expressive use of shell and ochre around 80,000 BC .9 Comparably ancient finds are also known from other parts of Africa, but it’s not until later, around 45,000 years ago – by which time our species was busily colonizing Eurasia – that similar evidence starts appearing much more widely, and in greater quantities.
考虑一下我们现在称之为复杂的象征性人类行为的第一个直接证据,或简单的 “文化”。目前,它可以追溯到不超过 10 万年前。在非洲大陆上,这种文化的证据究竟出现在哪里,主要取决于保存条件,以及迄今为止最容易进行考古调查的国家。南非海岸周围的岩石掩体是一个关键的来源,它捕获了史前的沉积物,产生了公元前 8 万年左右的有柄工具和使用贝壳和赭石的表现力的证据。9在非洲其他地区也有相当古老的发现,但直到后来,大约 4.5 万年前 —— 那时我们的物种正忙于殖民欧亚大陆 —— 类似的证据才开始更广泛地出现,而且数量更大。
In the 1980s and 1990s it was widely assumed that something profound happened, some kind of sudden creative efflorescence, around 45,000 years ago, variously referred to in the literature as the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ or even the ‘Human Revolution’.10 But in the last two decades it has become increasingly clear to researchers that this is most likely an illusion, created by biases in our evidence.
在 20 世纪 80 年代和 90 年代,人们普遍认为在 4.5 万年前发生了一些深刻的事情,某种突如其来的创造性喷发,在文献中被称为 “旧石器时代上部革命” 甚至是 “人类革命”。10但在过去的二十年里,研究人员越来越清楚地认识到,这很可能是一种幻觉,是由我们的证据中的偏见造成的。
Here’s why. Much of the evidence for this ‘revolution’ is restricted to a single part of the world: Europe, where it is associated with replacement of Neanderthals by Homo sapiens around 40,000 BC . It includes more advanced toolkits for hunting and handicrafts, the first clear evidence for the making of images in bone, ivory and clay – including the famous sculpted ‘female figurines’,11 dense clusters of carved and painted animal figures in caves, often observed with breathtaking accuracy; more elaborate ways of clothing and decorating the human body; the first attested use of musical instruments like bone flutes; regular exchange of raw materials over great distances, and also what are usually taken as the earliest proofs of social inequality, in the form of grand burials.
原因就在这里。这场 “革命” 的大部分证据仅限于世界的一个地区。欧洲,它与尼安德特人在公元前 40000 年左右被智人取代有关。它包括更先进的狩猎工具和手工艺品,用骨头、象牙和粘土制作图像的第一个明确证据 —— 包括著名的雕刻的 “女性雕像”。11 洞穴中密集的雕刻和绘画的动物形象,通常以惊人的精度进行观察;更精细的服装和人体装饰方式;首次证实使用骨笛等乐器;远距离定期交换原材料,以及通常被视为最早的社会不平等证据的大墓葬形式。
All this is impressive, and gives the impression of a lack of synchrony between the ticking of our genetic and cultural clocks. It seems to ask the question: why do so many tens of thousands of years stand between the biological origins of humanity and the widespread appearance of typically human forms of behaviour; between when we became capable of creating culture and when we finally got round to doing it? What were we actually doing in the interim? Many researchers have puzzled over this and have even coined a phrase for it: ‘the sapient paradox’.12 A few go so far as to postulate some late mutation in the human brain to explain the apparently superior cultural capacities of Upper Palaeolithic Europeans, but such views can no longer be taken seriously.
所有这些都令人印象深刻,给人的印象是我们的基因时钟和文化时钟之间缺乏同步性。这似乎是在问一个问题:为什么在人类的生物起源和典型的人类行为形式的广泛出现之间,以及在我们有能力创造文化和我们最终开始这样做之间,会有这么多万年的时间?在这期间,我们究竟在做什么?许多研究人员对此感到困惑,甚至为此创造了一个短语:“智人悖论”。12少数人甚至推测人类大脑的某些晚期突变,以解释旧石器时代上部欧洲人明显优越的文化能力,但这种观点已不再被认真对待。
In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the whole problem is a mirage. The reason archaeological evidence from Europe is so rich is that European governments tend to be rich; and that European professional institutions, learned societies and university departments have been pursuing prehistory far longer on their own doorstep than in other parts of the world. With each year that passes, new evidence accumulates for early behavioural complexity elsewhere: not just Africa, but also the Arabian Peninsula, Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent.13 Even as we write, a cave site on the coast of Kenya called Panga ya Saidi is yielding evidence of shell beads and worked pigments stretching back 60,000 years;14 and research on the islands of Borneo and Sulawesi is opening vistas on to an unsuspected world of cave art, many thousands of years older than the famous images of Lascaux and Altamira, on the other side of Eurasia.15 No doubt still earlier examples of complex pictorial art will one day be found somewhere on the continent of Africa.
事实上,越来越清楚的是,整个问题是一个幻觉。欧洲的考古证据之所以如此丰富,是因为欧洲政府往往很富有;而且欧洲的专业机构、学会和大学院系在自己家门口研究史前史的时间远远超过世界其他地方。随着时间的推移,其他地方的早期行为复杂性的新证据不断积累:不仅是非洲,还有阿拉伯半岛、东南亚和印度次大陆。13就在我们写这篇文章的时候,肯尼亚海岸的一个名为 Panga ya Saidi 的洞穴遗址正在产生 6 万年前的贝珠和加工颜料的证据。14婆罗洲岛和苏拉威西岛的研究为我们打开了一个未知的洞穴艺术世界,比欧亚大陆另一端的拉斯科和阿尔塔米拉的著名图像还要早几千年。15毫无疑问,在非洲大陆的某个地方,还将发现更早的复杂图像艺术的例子。
If anything, then, Europe was late to the party. Even after its initial colonization by modern humans – starting around 45,000 BC – the continent was still thinly populated, and the new arrivals coexisted there, albeit fairly briefly, with more established Neanderthal populations (themselves engaged in complex cultural activities of various sorts).16 Why there appears to be such a sudden cultural efflorescence, shortly after their arrival, may have something to do with climate and demography. To put it bluntly: with the movement of the ice sheets, human populations in Europe were living in harsher and more confined spaces than our species had encountered before. Game-rich valleys and steppe were bounded by tundra to the north and dense coastal forests to the south. We have to picture our ancestors moving between relatively enclosed environments, dispersing and gathering, tracking the seasonal movements of mammoth, bison and deer herds. While the absolute number of people may still have been startlingly small,17 the density of human interactions seems to have radically increased, especially at certain times of year. And with this came remarkable bursts of cultural expression.18
如果说有什么问题的话,那么,欧洲是迟到的。即使在现代人最初殖民之后 —— 大约从公元前 45000 年开始 —— 该大陆仍然人口稀少,新来的人在那里与更成熟的尼安德特人(他们自己从事各种复杂的文化活动)共存,尽管时间相当短暂。16为什么在他们到达后不久会出现如此突然的文化繁荣,这可能与气候和人口有关。直截了当地说:随着冰原的移动,欧洲的人类人口生活在比我们人类以前遇到的更严酷、更封闭的空间。猎物丰富的山谷和大草原被北部的苔原和南部的茂密海岸森林所包围。我们不得不想象我们的祖先在相对封闭的环境中移动,分散和采集,追踪猛犸象、野牛和鹿群的季节性移动。虽然人的绝对数量可能仍然少得惊人。17人类互动的密度似乎已经大大增加,特别是在一年中的某些时候。随之而来的是文化表达的显著爆发。18
As we will see in a moment, the societies that resulted in what archaeologists call the Upper Palaeolithic period (roughly 50,000–15,000 BC ) – with their ‘princely’ burials and grand communal buildings – seem to completely defy our image of a world made up of tiny egalitarian forager bands. The disconnect is so profound that some archaeologists have begun taking the opposite tack, describing Ice Age Europe as populated by ‘hierarchical’ or even ‘stratified’ societies. In this, they make common cause with evolutionary psychologists who insist that dominance behaviour is hardwired in our genes, so much so that the moment society goes beyond tiny bands, it must necessarily take the form of some ruling over others.
稍后我们将看到,考古学家所称的上旧石器时代(大约公元前 5 万至 1.5 万年)的社会 —— 其 “王子” 式的墓葬和宏伟的公共建筑 —— 似乎完全违背了我们对一个由微小的平等主义觅食者组成的世界的印象。这种脱节是如此深刻,以至于一些考古学家已经开始采取相反的态度,将冰河时代的欧洲描述为由 “等级” 甚至 “分层” 社会居住。在这一点上,他们与进化心理学家达成了共识,后者坚持认为统治行为在我们的基因中是根深蒂固的,以至于当社会超越了小团体时,它必然会采取一些人统治其他人的形式。
Almost everyone who isn’t a Pleistocene archaeologist – that is, who is not forced to confront the evidence – simply ignores it and carries on exactly as they had before, writing as if hunter-gatherers can be assumed to have lived in a state of primordial innocence. As Christopher Boehm puts it, we seem doomed to play out an endless recycling of the war between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’: those who view humans as either innately hierarchical or innately egalitarian.
几乎所有不是更新世考古学家的人 —— 也就是说,没有被迫面对这些证据的人 —— 都简单地忽略它,完全像以前那样继续下去,写得好像可以假定狩猎·采集者生活在原始的纯真状态中。正如克里斯托弗·博姆所说,我们似乎注定要在 “霍布斯式的鹰派和卢梭式的鸽派” 之间进行无休止的循环战争:那些认为人类是天生的等级制度或天生的平等主义的人。
Boehm’s own work is revealing in this regard. An evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate studies, he argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way. Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth – ridicule, shame, shunning (and in the case of inveterate sociopaths, sometimes even outright assassination)19 – none of which have any parallel among other primates.
在这方面,博姆自己的工作很有启示意义。作为一名进化人类学家和灵长类动物研究专家,他认为,虽然人类确实有一种本能的倾向,即从事支配·顺从行为,这无疑是从我们的类人猿祖先那里继承来的,但使社会成为独特的人类的是我们能够有意识地决定不采取这种方式。博姆仔细研究了非洲、南美和东南亚现有的平等主义觅食群体的人种学描述,发现了一整套集体采用的战术,将可能的吹牛者和欺凌者打倒在地 —— 嘲笑、羞辱、回避(对于顽固的反社会者来说,有时甚至直接暗杀)。19 —— 所有这些在其他灵长类动物中都不存在。
For instance, while gorillas do not mock each other for beating their chests, humans do so regularly. Even more strikingly, while the bullying behaviour might well be instinctual, counter-bullying is not: it’s a well-thought-out strategy, and forager societies who engage in it display what Boehm calls ‘actuarial intelligence’. That’s to say, they understand what their society might look like if they did things differently: if, for instance, skilled hunters were not systematically belittled, or if elephant meat was not portioned out to the group by someone chosen at random (as opposed to the person who actually killed the beast). This, he concludes, is the essence of politics: the ability to reflect consciously on different directions one’s society could take, and to make explicit arguments why it should take one path rather than another. In this sense, one could say Aristotle was right when he described human beings as ‘political animals’ – since this is precisely what other primates never do, at least not to our knowledge.
例如,虽然大猩猩不会因为拍胸脯而互相嘲讽,但人类却经常这样做。更惊人的是,虽然欺凌行为很可能是本能的,但反欺凌却不是:它是一种经过深思熟虑的策略,从事这种行为的觅食者社会显示出博姆所说的 “精算智慧”。也就是说,他们了解如果他们以不同的方式做事,他们的社会可能会是什么样子:例如,如果熟练的猎人不被系统地贬低,或者如果大象的肉不是由随机选择的人(而不是真正杀死野兽的人)分给群体。他的结论是,这就是政治的本质:有意识地思考一个人的社会可能采取的不同方向,并明确论证为什么它应该走一条路而不是另一条。在这个意义上,当亚里士多德把人类描述为 “政治动物” 时,我们可以说他是对的 —— 因为这正是其他灵长类动物从未做过的事情,至少据我们所知是如此。
This is a brilliant and important argument – but, like so many authors, Boehm seems strangely reluctant to consider its full implications. Let’s do so now.
这是一个杰出而重要的论点 —— 但是,像许多作者一样,博姆似乎奇怪地不愿意考虑其全部含义。让我们现在就这样做。
If the very essence of our humanity consists of the fact that we are self-conscious political actors, and therefore capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements, would that not mean human beings should actually have explored a wide range of social arrangements over the greater part of our history? In the end, confusingly, Boehm assumes that all human beings until very recently chose instead to follow exactly the same arrangements – we were strictly ‘egalitarian for thousands of generations before hierarchical societies began to appear’ – thereby casually tossing early humans back into the Garden of Eden once again. Only with the beginnings of agriculture, he suggests, did we all collectively flip back to hierarchy. Before 12,000 years ago, Boehm insists, humans were basically egalitarian, living in what he calls ‘societies of equals, and outside the family there were no dominators’.20
如果我们人类的本质在于我们是有自我意识的政治行为者,因此能够接受广泛的社会安排,这岂不是意味着人类,在我们历史的大部分时间里,我们实际上应该探索广泛的社会安排?最后,令人困惑的是,博姆假设所有人类直到最近都选择遵循完全相同的安排 —— 在等级社会开始出现之前,我们严格地 “平均主义了几千代” —— 从而随意地将早期人类再次抛回伊甸园。他认为,只有随着农业的开始,我们才集体地回到了等级制度。博姆坚持认为,在 1.2 万年前,人类基本上是平等的,生活在他所说的 “平等的社会中,在家庭之外,没有统治者”。20
So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live just one way; then, of course, they began to rush headlong into their chains, and ape-like dominance patterns re-emerged. The solution to the battle between ‘Hobbesian hawks and Rousseauian doves’ turns out to be: our genetic nature is Hobbesian, but our political history is pretty much exactly as described by Rousseau. The result? An odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened. This is an unsettling conclusion, especially when we consider some of the actual archaeological evidence for the existence of ‘Palaeolithic politics’.
因此,根据博姆的说法,在大约 20 万年的时间里,政治动物都只选择一种生活方式;当然,后来他们开始一头扎进自己的枷锁里,猿猴般的统治模式重新出现。解决 “霍布斯式的鹰和卢梭式的鸽子” 之争的办法原来是:我们的遗传性质是霍布斯式的,但我们的政治历史几乎完全是卢梭描述的那样。其结果是什么?一个奇怪的坚持,即几万年来,什么都没有发生。这是一个令人不安的结论,特别是当我们考虑到 “旧石器时代政治” 存在的一些实际的考古学证据。
Let’s start with rich hunter-gatherer burials. Examples can be found across much of western Eurasia, from the Dordogne to the Don. They include discoveries in rock shelters and open-air settlements. Some of the earliest come from sites like Sunghir in northern Russia and Dolní Věstonice in the Moravian basin, south of Brno, and date from between 34,000 and 26,000 years ago. What we find here are not cemeteries but isolated burials of individuals or small groups, their bodies often placed in striking postures and decorated – in some cases, almost saturated – with ornaments. In the case of Sunghir that meant many thousands of beads, laboriously worked from mammoth ivory and fox teeth. Originally, such beads would have decorated clothing made of fur and animal skins. Some of the most lavish costumes are from the conjoined burials of two boys, flanked by great lances made of straightened mammoth tusks.21
让我们从丰富的狩猎·采集者墓葬开始。在欧亚大陆西部的大部分地区,从多尔多涅河到顿河,都可以找到这样的例子。它们包括在岩石掩体和露天定居点的发现。一些最早的遗址来自俄罗斯北部的 Sunghir 和布尔诺南部摩拉维亚盆地的 Dolní Věstonice,其年代在 34000 年至 26000 年前。我们在这里发现的不是墓地,而是孤立的个人或小群体的墓葬,他们的尸体通常以引人注目的姿势摆放,并以装饰品装饰 —— 在某些情况下,几乎是饱和的。在 Sunghir 的案例中,这意味着数以千计的珠子,是用猛犸象牙和狐狸牙齿费力地加工而成。最初,这种珠子是用来装饰毛皮和兽皮制成的衣服的。一些最奢华的服装来自于两个男孩的连体葬,他们的两侧是用拉直的猛犸象牙制成的大长矛。21
At Dolní Věstonice, one triple burial contains two young men with elaborate headdresses, posed either side of an older man, all lying on a bed of soil stained red with ochre.22 Of similar antiquity is a group of cave burials unearthed on the coast of Liguria, near the modern border between Italy and France. Complete bodies of young or adult men, including one especially lavish interment known to archaeologists as Il Principe (‘the Prince’), were laid out in striking poses and suffused with jewellery, including beads made of marine shell and deer canines, as well as blades of exotic flint. Il Principe bears that name because he’s also buried with what looks to the modern eye like royal regalia: a flint sceptre, elk antler batons and an ornate headdress lovingly fashioned from perforated shells and deer teeth. Moving further west, to the Dordogne, we encounter a 16,000-year-old burial of a young woman, the so-called ‘Lady of Saint-Germain-de-la-Rivière’, which contains a rich assemblage of stomach and pelvic ornaments made of shell and stag teeth. The teeth are taken from deer hunted in the Spanish Basque country 190 miles away.23
在 Dolní Věstonice,一个三层的墓葬包含了两个带着精致头饰的年轻人,摆在一个老年人的两侧,他们都躺在被赭石染成红色的土床上。22在现代意大利和法国边界附近的利古里亚海岸出土的一组洞穴墓葬具有类似的古老性。年轻或成年男子的完整尸体,包括一个被考古学家称为 Il Principe(“王子”)的特别奢华的埋葬物,被摆出引人注目的姿势,并充满了珠宝,包括海洋贝壳和鹿齿制成的珠子,以及异国火石的刀片。Il Principe 之所以叫这个名字,是因为他还被埋葬在一个在现代人看来像皇室礼服的地方:燧石权杖、麋鹿角棒和一个用穿孔贝壳和鹿牙精心制作的华丽头饰。再往西走,到了多尔多涅,我们遇到了一个 16000 年前的年轻女子的墓葬,即所谓的 “圣日耳曼·德拉·里维埃夫人”,其中有大量用贝壳和鹿齿制成的腹部和骨盆装饰品。这些牙齿取自 190 英里外的西班牙巴斯克地区狩猎的鹿。23
Such findings have completely altered the specialist view of human societies in prehistory. The pendulum has swung so far away from the old notion of egalitarian bands that some archaeologists now argue that, thousands of years before the origins of farming, human societies were already divided along lines of status, class and inherited power. As we’ll see, this is highly unlikely, but the evidence these archaeologists point to is real enough: for instance, the extraordinary outlays of labour involved in making grave goods (10,000 work hours for the Sunghir beads alone, by some estimates); the highly advanced and standardized methods of production, possibly suggesting specialized craftspeople; or the way in which exotic, prestigious materials were transported from very distant locations; and, most suggestive of all, a few cases where such wealth was buried with children, maybe implying some kind of inherited status.24
这些发现完全改变了专家对史前人类社会的看法。钟摆已经远远偏离了平等主义的旧观念,以至于一些考古学家现在认为,在农耕起源的几千年前,人类社会就已经按照地位、阶级和继承的权力划分。正如我们将看到的,这是很不可能的,但这些考古学家指出的证据是足够真实的:例如,制作墓葬物品所涉及的非凡的劳动支出(根据一些估计,仅 Sunghir 珠子就有 10,000 个工作小时);高度先进和标准化的生产方法,可能表明专门的工匠;或异国情调、有声望的材料从非常遥远的地方运输的方式;以及,最具有暗示性的,这种财富与儿童一起埋葬的少数情况,也许意味着某种继承的地位。24
Another unexpected result of recent archaeological research, causing many to revise their view of prehistoric hunter-gatherers, is the appearance of monumental architecture. In Eurasia, the most famous examples are the stone temples of the Germus¸ Mountains, overlooking the Harran Plain in southeast Turkey. In the 1990s, German archaeologists, working on the plain’s northern frontier, began uncovering extremely ancient remains at a place known locally as Göbekli Tepe.25 What they found has since come to be regarded as an evolutionary conundrum. The main source of puzzlement is a group of twenty megalithic enclosures, initially raised there around 9000 BC, and then repeatedly modified over many centuries. These enclosures were established at a time when the surrounding plain was a mixture of woodland and steppe, teeming with wild plant and animal species that colonized the Middle East as the last Ice Age was drawing to a close.
最近的考古研究的另一个出乎意料的结果,使许多人修改了他们对史前狩猎采集者的看法,就是纪念性建筑的出现。在欧亚大陆,最著名的例子是俯瞰土耳其东南部哈兰平原的格尔木山的石庙。20 世纪 90 年代,德国考古学家在该平原的北部边境工作时,开始在一个当地人称为 Göbekli Tepe 的地方发现了极其古老的遗迹。25他们的发现后来被认为是一个进化的难题。令人困惑的主要来源是一组 20 个巨石围墙,最初是在公元前 9000 年左右建立的,然后在许多世纪中反复修改。这些围墙建立的时候,周围的平原是林地和草原的混合体,充斥着野生植物和动物物种,这些物种在最后一个冰河时代即将结束的时候在中东地区殖民。
The enclosures at Göbekli Tepe are massive. They comprise great T-shaped pillars, some over sixteen feet high and weighing up to a ton, which were hewn from the site’s limestone bedrock or nearby quarries. The pillars, at least 200 in total, were raised into sockets and linked by walls of rough stone. Each is a unique work of sculpture, carved with images from the world of dangerous carnivores and poisonous reptiles, as well as game species, waterfowl and small scavengers. Animal forms project from the rock in varying depths of relief: some hover coyly on the surface, others emerge boldly into three dimensions. These often nightmarish creatures follow divergent orientations, some marching to the horizon, others working their way down into the earth. In places, the pillar itself becomes a sort of standing body, with human-like limbs and clothing.
Göbekli Tepe 的围墙非常巨大。它们由巨大的 T 形柱子组成,有些柱子超过 16 英尺高,重达一吨,是由该遗址的石灰岩基岩或附近的采石场凿成的。这些柱子,至少有 200 根,被抬到插座里,用粗糙的石头墙连接起来。每一个都是独特的雕塑作品,雕刻着来自危险的食肉动物和有毒的爬行动物,以及野味物种、水禽和小型食腐动物的世界形象。动物的形态从岩石中凸显出来,浮雕的深度各不相同:有些在表面腼腆地盘旋,有些则大胆地出现在三维空间。这些往往是噩梦般的生物遵循不同的方向,有些向地平线行进,有些则向大地深处努力。在一些地方,柱子本身成为一种站立的身体,有类似人类的四肢和衣服。
The creation of these remarkable buildings implies strictly co-ordinated activity on a really large scale, even more so if multiple enclosures were constructed simultaneously, according to an overall plan (a current point of debate).26 But the larger question remains: who made them? While groups of humans not too far away had already begun cultivating crops at the time, to the best of our knowledge those who built Göbekli Tepe had not. Yes, they harvested and processed wild cereals and other plants in season, but there is no compelling reason to see them as ‘proto-farmers’, or to suggest they had any interest in orienting their livelihoods around the domestication of crops. Indeed, there was no particular reason why they should, given the availability of fruits, berries, nuts and edible wild fauna in their vicinity. (In fact, there are good reasons to think the builders of Göbekli Tepe were different, in some quite startling ways, from nearby groups who were beginning to take up farming, but this will have to wait for a later chapter; for the moment, we’re just interested in the monuments.)
这些非凡的建筑的创造意味着在一个真正的大范围内严格协调的活动,如果多个围墙是根据一个整体计划同时建造的(目前是一个争论的焦点),情况就更加严重。26但更大的问题仍然是:谁制造了它们?虽然当时不远处的人类群体,已经开始种植农作物,但据我们所知,建造 Göbekli Tepe 的人还没有。是的,他们在季节中收获和加工野生谷物和其他植物,但没有令人信服的理由将他们视为 “原农夫”,或表明他们对围绕作物驯化的生计有任何兴趣。事实上,鉴于他们附近有水果、浆果、坚果和可食用的野生动物,他们没有特别的理由要这样做。(事实上,我们有充分的理由认为哥贝克利特佩的建造者在某些方面与附近开始从事农业生产的群体不同,但这要等到以后的章节;目前,我们只对纪念碑感兴趣。)
To some, the raised location and orientation of the buildings at Göbekli Tepe suggest an astronomical or chronometric function, each chain of pillars aligned with a particular cycle of celestial movements. Archaeologists remain sceptical, pointing out that the structures may once have been roofed, and that their layout was subject to many alterations over time. But what has mostly intrigued scholars of different disciplines so far is something else: the apparent proof they offer that ‘hunter-gatherer societies had evolved institutions to support major public works, projects, and monumental constructions, and thus had a complex social hierarchy prior to their adoption of farming.’27 Again, matters are not so simple, because these two phenomena – hierarchy and the measure of time – were closely interwoven.
在一些人看来,戈拜克利特佩的建筑物的凸起位置和方向表明其具有天文或计时功能,每条柱子链都与天体运动的特定周期相一致。考古学家们仍然持怀疑态度,他们指出这些建筑可能曾经有屋顶,而且它们的布局随着时间的推移发生了许多改变。但迄今为止,最让不同学科的学者感兴趣的是另一件事:他们提供的明显证据是:“狩猎采集社会已经进化出支持大型公共工程、项目和纪念性建筑的机构,因此在他们采用农耕之前就有了复杂的社会等级制度。27同样,事情并不那么简单,因为这两种现象 —— 等级制度和时间的衡量 —— 是紧密交织在一起的。
While Göbekli Tepe is often presented as an anomaly, there is in fact a great deal of evidence for monumental construction of different sorts among hunter-gatherers in earlier periods, extending back into the Ice Age.
虽然 Göbekli Tepe 经常被认为是一个反常现象,但事实上有大量的证据表明,在早期的狩猎采集者中存在着不同种类的纪念碑建筑,并延伸到冰河时代。
In Europe, between 25,000 and 12,000 years ago public works were already a feature of human habitation across an area reaching from Kraków to Kiev. Along this transect of the glacial fringe, remains of impressive circular structures have been found that are clearly distinguishable from ordinary camp-dwellings in their scale (the largest were over thirty-nine feet in diameter), permanence, aesthetic qualities and prominent locations in the Pleistocene landscape. Each was erected on a framework made of mammoth tusks and bones, taken from many tens of these great animals, which were arranged in alternating sequences and patterns that go beyond the merely functional to produce structures that would have looked quite striking to our eyes, and magnificent indeed to people at the time. Great wooden enclosures of up to 130 feet in length also existed, of which only the post-holes and sunken floors remain.28 Göbekli Tepe too is likely to have had its wooden counterparts.
在欧洲,25000 年至 12000 年前,在从克拉科夫到基辅的地区,公共工程已经成为人类居住的一个特点。沿着冰川边缘的这一横断面,发现了令人印象深刻的圆形建筑的遗迹,它们的规模(最大的直径超过 39 英尺)、持久性、美学质量和在更新世景观中的突出位置都与普通的营地住宅明显不同。 每一个都是在一个由猛犸象牙和骨头组成的框架上建立起来的,这些猛犸象牙和骨头取自几十头这些伟大的动物,它们以交替的顺序和模式排列,超越了单纯的功能,产生了在我们眼中相当引人注目的结构,对当时的人们来说确实很宏伟。还存在着长达 130 英尺的巨大的木制围栏,其中只有柱洞和下沉的地板被保留下来。28Göbekli Tepe 也可能有其木制的对应物。
Monumentality is always to some degree a relative concept; that’s to say, a building or structure is ‘monumental’ only in comparison to other buildings and structures a viewer has actually experienced. Obviously, the Ice Age produced nothing on the scale of the Pyramids of Giza or the Roman Colosseum – but, by the standards of their day, the kind of structures we’ve been describing can only have been considered public works, involving sophisticated design and the co-ordination of labour on an impressive scale. Research at the Russian site of Yudinovo suggests that ‘mammoth houses’, as they are often called, were not in fact dwellings at all, but monuments in the strict sense: carefully planned and constructed to commemorate the completion of a great mammoth hunt (and the solidarity of the extended hunting group), using whatever durable parts remained once carcasses had been processed for their meat and hides; and later covered with sediment to create a durable marker in the landscape.29 We are talking here about really staggering quantities of meat: for each structure (there were five at Yudinovo), there was enough mammoth to feed hundreds of people for around three months.30 Open-air settlements like Yudinovo, Mezhirich and Kostenki, where such mammoth monuments were erected, often became central places whose inhabitants exchanged amber, marine shells and animal pelts over impressive distances.
纪念性在某种程度上总是一个相对的概念;也就是说,一个建筑或结构只有在与观众实际经历过的其他建筑和结构相比时才是 “纪念性的”。显然,冰河时代没有产生任何像吉萨金字塔或罗马斗兽场那样的规模 —— 但是,按照他们当时的标准,我们所描述的那种结构只能被认为是公共工程,涉及复杂的设计和规模惊人的劳动协调。在俄罗斯尤迪诺沃遗址的研究表明,人们常说的 “猛犸象房屋” 实际上根本不是住宅,而是严格意义上的纪念碑:精心策划和建造,以纪念一次伟大的猛犸象狩猎活动的完成(以及整个狩猎团体的团结),使用的是尸体被加工成肉和皮后剩下的任何耐用部件;后来用泥沙覆盖,在景观中形成一个持久的标记。29我们在这里谈论的是真正数量惊人的肉:每个结构(在 Yudinovo 有五个),有足够的猛犸象供数百人食用约三个月。30像 Yudinovo、Mezhirich 和 Kostenki 这样的露天定居点,在这些地方竖立着这样的猛犸象纪念碑,往往成为中心场所,居民们在令人印象深刻的距离内交换琥珀、海洋贝壳和动物皮毛。
So what are we to make of all this evidence for stone temples, princely burials, mammoth monuments and bustling centres of trade and craft production, stretching back far into the Ice Age? What are they doing there, in a Palaeolithic world where – at least on some accounts – nothing much is ever supposed to have happened, and human societies can best be understood by analogy with troops of chimps or bonobos? Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some have responded by completely abandoning the idea of an egalitarian Golden Age, concluding instead that this must have been a society dominated by powerful leaders, even dynasties – and, therefore, that self-aggrandizement and coercive power have always been the enduring forces behind human social evolution. But this doesn’t really work either.
那么,我们该如何看待所有这些关于石庙、王子墓葬、猛犸象纪念碑和繁华的贸易和手工业生产中心的证据,这些证据一直延伸到冰河时代?在一个旧石器时代的世界里 —— 至少在某些方面 —— 从来没有发生过什么事情,人类社会可以通过与黑猩猩或倭黑猩猩的队伍进行类比而得到最好的理解,他们在那里做什么?不足为奇的是,也许有些人通过完全放弃平等主义黄金时代的想法来回应,相反,他们的结论是,这一定是一个由强大的领导人,甚至是王朝主导的社会 —— 因此,自我膨胀和胁迫性权力一直是人类社会进化背后持久的力量。但这也不太行得通。
Evidence of institutional inequality in Ice Age societies, whether grand burials or monumental buildings, is sporadic. Richly costumed burials appear centuries, and often hundreds of miles, apart. Even if we put this down to the patchiness of the evidence, we still have to ask why the evidence is so patchy in the first place: after all, if any of these Ice Age ‘princes’ had behaved like, say, Bronze Age (let alone Renaissance Italian) princes, we’d also be finding all the usual trappings of centralized power: fortifications, storehouses, palaces. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling ‘states’. To understand why the early record of human social life is patterned in this strange, staccato fashion we first have to do away with some lingering preconceptions about ‘primitive’ mentalities.
在冰河时代的社会中,无论是宏伟的墓葬还是纪念性的建筑,有关制度上的不平等的证据都是零星的。装束丰富的墓葬出现在几个世纪之后,而且往往相隔数百英里。即使我们把这归结为证据的不完整,我们仍然要问为什么证据首先是如此不完整的:毕竟,如果这些冰河时代的 “王子” 的行为像青铜时代(更不用说文艺复兴时期的意大利)的王子一样,我们也会发现所有中央集权的通常标志:防御工事、仓库、宫殿。相反,在几万年的时间里,我们看到的是纪念碑和宏伟的墓葬,但几乎没有其他东西可以表明等级社会的发展,更不用说任何与 “国家” 相近的东西。为了理解为什么人类社会生活的早期记录是以这种奇怪的、不紧不慢的方式进行的,我们首先要摒弃一些关于 “原始” 心理的挥之不去的成见。
In the last chapter, we suggested that the really insidious element of Rousseau’s legacy is not so much the idea of the ‘noble savage’ as that of the ‘stupid savage’. We may have got over the overt racism of most nineteenth-century Europeans, or at least we think we have, but it’s not unusual to find even very sophisticated contemporary thinkers who feel it’s more appropriate to compare ‘bands’ of hunter-gatherers with chimps or baboons than with anyone they’d ever be likely to meet. Consider the following passage from the historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014). Harari starts off with a perfectly reasonable observation: that our knowledge of early human history is extremely limited, and social arrangements probably varied a great deal from place to place. True, he overstates his case (he suggests we can really know nothing, even about the Ice Age), but the basic point is well taken. Then we get this:
在上一章中,我们提出,卢梭遗产中真正阴险的因素不是 “高贵的野蛮人”,而是 “愚蠢的野蛮人” 的想法。我们可能已经克服了大多数 19 世纪欧洲人公开的种族主义,或者至少我们认为我们已经克服了,但是,即使是非常成熟的当代思想家,也会觉得把狩猎采集者的 “部落” 与黑猩猩或狒狒相比,比与他们可能遇到的任何人相比更合适。考虑一下历史学家尤瓦尔·诺亚·哈拉里的《人类的简史》(2014)中的以下段落。哈拉里以一个完全合理的观点开始:我们对早期人类历史的了解极其有限,社会安排可能因地而异。诚然,他夸大了他的情况(他建议我们真的可以什么都不知道,甚至关于冰河时期),但基本观点是很好的。然后我们得到了这个:
The sociopolitical world of the foragers is another area about which we know next to nothing … scholars cannot even agree on the basics, such as the existence of private property, nuclear families and monogamous relationships. It’s likely that different bands had different structures. Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos.
觅食者的社会政治世界是另一个我们几乎一无所知的领域…… 学者们甚至不能就基本问题达成一致,例如私有财产、核心家庭和一夫一妻制的存在。很可能不同的部落有不同的结构。有些可能像最讨厌的黑猩猩群体那样等级森严、紧张和暴力,而另一些则像一群倭黑猩猩那样悠闲、和平和淫荡。
So not only was everyone living in bands until farming came along, but these bands were basically ape-like in character. If this seems unfair to the author, remember that Harari could just as easily have written ‘as tense and violent as the nastiest biker gang’, and ‘as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a hippie commune’. One might have imagined the obvious thing to compare one group of human beings with would be … another group of human beings. Why, then, did Harari choose chimps instead of bikers? It’s hard to escape the impression that the main point of difference is that bikers choose to live the way they do. Such choices imply political consciousness: the ability to argue and reflect about the proper way to live – which is precisely, as Boehm reminds us, what apes don’t do. Yet Harari, like so many others, chooses to compare early humans with apes anyway.
因此,在农业出现之前,不仅每个人都生活在族群中,而且这些族群基本上都有猿猴般的性格。如果这似乎对作者不公平,请记住,哈拉里可以很容易地写出 “像最讨厌的摩托车帮一样紧张和暴力”,以及 “像嬉皮公社一样悠闲、和平和淫荡”。人们可能会想象,将一群人与另一群人进行比较的明显事物是…… 另一群人。那么,为什么哈拉里选择黑猩猩而不是摩托车手?很难摆脱这样的印象,即主要的差异点是骑自行车的人选择以他们的方式生活。这种选择意味着政治意识:有能力争论和反思正确的生活方式 —— 正如博姆提醒我们的那样,这正是猩猩不做的事情。然而,哈拉里和其他许多人一样,还是选择了将早期人类与猿猴进行比较。
In this way, the ‘sapient paradox’ returns. Not as something real, but as a side effect of the weird way we read the evidence: insisting either that for countless millennia we had modern brains, but for some reason decided to live like monkeys anyway; or that we had the ability to overcome our simian instincts and organize ourselves in an endless variety of ways, but for some equally obscure reason only ever chose one way to organize ourselves.
这样一来,“智人悖论” 就回来了。不是作为真实的东西,而是作为我们解读证据的奇怪方式的副作用:坚持认为在无数个千年里,我们有现代的大脑,但由于某种原因决定像猴子一样生活;或者我们有能力克服我们的类人本能,以无穷无尽的方式组织自己,但由于某种同样模糊的原因,只选择一种方式来组织自己。
Perhaps the real question here is what it means to be a ‘self-conscious political actor’. Philosophers tend to define human consciousness in terms of self-awareness; neuroscientists, on the other hand, tell us we spend the overwhelming majority of our time effectively on autopilot, working out habitual forms of behaviour without any sort of conscious reflection. When we are capable of self-awareness, it’s usually for very brief periods of time: the ‘window of consciousness’, during which we can hold a thought or work out a problem, tends to be open on average for roughly seven seconds. What neuroscientists (and it must be said, most contemporary philosophers) almost never notice, however, is that the great exception to this is when we’re talking to someone else. In conversation, we can hold thoughts and reflect on problems sometimes for hours on end. This is of course why so often, even if we’re trying to figure something out by ourselves, we imagine arguing with or explaining it to someone else. Human thought is inherently dialogic. Ancient philosophers tended to be keenly aware of all this: that’s why, whether they were in China, India or Greece, they tended to write their books in the form of dialogues. Humans were only fully self-conscious when arguing with one another, trying to sway each other’s views, or working out a common problem. True individual self-consciousness, meanwhile, was imagined as something that a few wise sages could perhaps achieve through long study, exercise, discipline and meditation.
也许这里真正的问题是成为 “有自我意识的政治行为者” 意味着什么。哲学家们倾向于用自我意识来定义人类的意识;另一方面,神经科学家们告诉我们,我们,绝大多数时间都是在自动驾驶中度过的,在没有任何有意识的反思的情况下形成习惯性的行为。当我们有能力进行自我意识时,通常是在非常短暂的时间内:“意识窗口”,在这期间我们可以保持一个想法或解决一个问题,往往平均开放约 7 秒。然而,神经科学家(必须说,大多数当代哲学家)几乎从未注意到的是,这一点的最大例外是当我们与他人交谈时。在谈话中,我们可以保持思考,有时可以连续几个小时思考问题。当然,这也是为什么很多时候,即使我们想自己搞清楚一些事情,我们也会想象着与别人争论或向别人解释。人类的思想本质上是对话性的。古代哲学家往往敏锐地意识到这一点:这就是为什么,无论他们是在中国、印度还是希腊,他们都倾向于以对话的形式写书。人类只有在相互争论,试图动摇对方的观点,或解决一个共同的问题时才有充分的自我意识。同时,真正的个人自我意识被想象成一些聪明的圣人通过长期的学习、锻炼、纪律和冥想也许能达到的东西。
What we’d now call political consciousness was always assumed to come first. In this sense, the Western philosophical tradition has taken a rather unusual direction over the last few centuries. Around the same time as it abandoned dialogue as its typical mode of writing, it also began imagining the isolated, rational, self-conscious individual not as a rare achievement, something typically accomplished – if at all – after literally years of living isolated in a cave or monastic cell, or on top of a pillar in a desert somewhere, but as the normal default state of human beings anywhere.
我们现在称之为政治意识的东西总是被认为是第一位的。在这个意义上,西方哲学传统在过去几个世纪中采取了一个相当不寻常的方向。大约在它放弃对话作为其典型的写作模式的同时,它也开始想象孤立的、理性的、有自我意识的个人不是一种罕见的成就,这种成就通常是在与世隔绝地生活在山洞或修道院的牢房里,或在沙漠的某个地方的柱子顶上多年后完成的,而是作为任何地方的人类的正常默认状态。
Even stranger, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was political self-consciousness that European philosophers came to see as some kind of amazing historical achievement: as a phenomenon which only really became possible with the Enlightenment itself, and the subsequent American and French Revolutions. Before that, it was assumed, people blindly followed traditions, or what they assumed to be the will of God. Even when peasants or popular rebels rose up to try to overthrow oppressive regimes they couldn’t admit they were doing so, but convinced themselves they were restoring ‘ancient customs’ or acting on some kind of divine inspiration. To Victorian intellectuals, the notion of people self-consciously imagining a social order more to their liking and then trying to bring it into being was simply not applicable before the modern age – and most were deeply divided as to whether it would even be a good idea in their own time.
更奇怪的是,在十八和十九世纪的过程中,欧洲哲学家将政治自我意识视为某种惊人的历史成就:作为一种现象,只有在启蒙运动本身,以及随后的美洲和法国革命中才真正成为可能。在此之前,人们被认为是盲目地遵循传统,或者他们认为是上帝的意志。甚至当农民或民众反叛者起来试图推翻压迫性政权时,他们也不能承认他们,而是说服自己他们是在恢复 “古老的习俗” 或根据某种神圣的灵感行事。对维多利亚时代的知识分子来说,人们自觉地想象一种更符合自己喜好的社会秩序,然后试图将其变为现实,这种概念在现代社会之前根本不适用 —— 而且大多数人对这在他们自己的时代是否是一个好主意存在很大分歧。
All this would have come as a great surprise to Kandiaronk, the seventeenth-century Wendat philosopher-statesman whose impact on European political thought we discussed in the previous chapter. Like many North American peoples of his time, Kandiaronk’s Wendat nation saw their society as a confederation created by conscious agreement; agreements open to continual renegotiation. But by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many in Europe and America had reached the point of arguing that someone like Kandiaronk could never have really existed in the first place. ‘Primitive’ folk, they argued, were not only incapable of political self-consciousness, they were not even capable of fully conscious thought on the individual level – or at least conscious thought worthy of the name. That is, just as they pretended a ‘rational Western individual’ (say, a British train guard or French colonial official) could be assumed to be fully self-aware all the time (a clearly absurd assumption), they argued that anyone classified as a ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ operated with a ‘pre-logical mentality’, or lived in a mythological dreamworld. At best, they were mindless conformists, bound in the shackles of tradition; at worst, they were incapable of fully conscious, critical thought of any kind.
所有这些对坎迪阿伦克来说都是一个巨大的惊喜,坎迪阿伦克是十七世纪温达特人的哲学家·政治家,我们在上一章讨论了他对欧洲政治思想的影响。像他那个时代的许多北美人一样,坎迪阿伦克的温达特民族认为他们的社会是一个由有意识的协议创造的联盟;这些协议可以不断地重新谈判。但到了十九世纪末和二十世纪初,欧洲和美洲的许多人已经达到了这样的程度:像坎迪阿伦克这样的人首先不可能真正存在。他们认为,“原始” 民族不仅没有政治上的自我意识,他们甚至没有能力在个人层面上进行完全自觉的思考 —— 或者至少是名副其实的自觉思考。也就是说,就像他们假装一个 “理性的西方人”(比如,英国的火车警卫或法国的殖民地官员)可以被假定为一直都有充分的自我意识(这显然是一个荒谬的假设)一样,他们认为任何被归类为 “原始人” 或 “野蛮人” 的人都以 “前逻辑心态” 运作,或者生活在一个神话般的梦境里。在最好的情况下,他们是无意识的顺从者,被传统的桎梏所束缚;在最坏的情况下,他们没有能力进行完全有意识的、任何形式的批判性思考。
Such theories might be considered the high-water mark of the reaction against the indigenous critique of European society. The ar- guments attributed to figures like Kandiaronk could be written off as simple projections of Western ‘noble savage’ fantasies, because real savages were assumed to live in an entirely different mental universe. Nowadays no reputable scholar would make such claims: everyone at least pays lip service to the psychic unity of mankind. But in practice, as we’ve seen, little has changed. Scholars still write as if those living in earlier stages of economic development, and especially those who are classified as ‘egalitarian’, can be treated as if they were literally all the same, living in some collective group-think: if human differences show up in any form – different ‘bands’ being different from each other – it is only in the same way that bands of great apes might differ. Political self-consciousness, or certainly anything we’d now call visionary politics, would have been impossible.
这种理论可能被认为是对欧洲社会的本土批判的反应的高水位标志。归因于坎迪阿伦克等人的论点可以被写成西方 “高贵的野蛮人” 幻想的简单投射,因为真正的野蛮人被认为生活在一个完全不同的精神世界中。如今,没有一个有声望的学者会提出这样的主张:每个人至少都在口头上支持人类的精神统一性。但在实践中,正如我们所看到的,几乎没有什么变化。学者们仍然在写作,好像那些生活在经济发展早期阶段的人,特别是那些被归类为 “平等主义” 的人,可以被当作他们真的都是一样的,生活在一些集体的群体思维中:如果人类的差异以任何形式出现 —— 不同的族群彼此不同,那只是以大猩猩的带子可能不同的方式。政治上的自我意识,或者当然是我们现在称之为有远见的政治的东西,本来是不可能的。
And if certain hunter-gatherers turn out not to have been living perpetually in ‘bands’ at all, but instead congregating to create grand landscape monuments, storing large quantities of preserved food and treating particular individuals like royalty, contemporary scholars are at best likely to place them in a new stage of development: they have moved up the scale from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ hunter-gatherers, a step closer to agriculture and urban civilization. But they are still caught in the same Turgot-like evolutionary straitjacket, their place in history defined by their mode of subsistence, and their role blindly to enact some abstract law of development which we understand but they do not; certainly, it rarely occurs to anyone to ask what sort of worlds they thought they were trying to create.31
如果某些狩猎采集者根本就不是长期生活在 “族群” 中,而是聚集在一起创造宏伟的景观纪念碑,储存大量的腌制食物,把特定的人当作皇室成员对待,那么当代学者最多可能把他们放在一个新的发展阶段:他们已经从 “简单” 的狩猎采集者上升到 “复杂” 的狩猎采集者,向农业和城市文明迈进。但他们仍然陷入了杜尔哥式的进化束缚中,他们在历史中的地位被他们的生存方式所界定,他们的角色盲目地制定一些我们理解但他们不理解的抽象的发展规律;当然,很少有人想到要问他们认为自己要创造的是什么样的世界。31
Now, admittedly, there have always been exceptions to this rule. Anthropologists who spend years talking to indigenous people in their own languages, and watching them argue with one another, tend to be well aware that even those who make their living hunting elephants or gathering lotus buds are just as sceptical, imaginative, thoughtful and capable of critical analysis as those who make their living by operating tractors, managing restaurants or chairing university departments. A few, such as the early-twentieth-century scholar Paul Radin in his 1927 book Primitive Man as Philosopher, ended up concluding that at least those he knew best – Winnebago and other Native North Americans – were actually, on average, rather more thoughtful.
现在,我承认,这条规则一直有例外。那些常年与原住民用他们自己的语言交谈,并观察他们相互争论的人类学家往往很清楚,即使是那些以猎杀大象或采集荷叶芽为生的人,也和那些以操作拖拉机、管理餐馆或主持大学系所为生的人一样,具有怀疑精神、想象力、思考力和批判分析的能力。少数人,如二十世纪初的学者保罗·雷丁在其 1927 年出版的《作为哲学家的原始人》一书中,最终得出结论,至少他最了解的人 —— 温尼贝戈人和其他北美原住民 —— 平均而言,其实更有思想。
Radin himself was considered something of an oddball by his contemporaries (he always avoided getting a proper academic job; the legend in Chicago was that when once given a teaching fellowship there, he was so intimidated before his first lecture that he immediately marched out to a nearby highway and contrived to get his leg broken by a car, then spent the rest of the term happily reading in the hospital). Perhaps not coincidentally, what really struck him about the ‘primitive’ societies he was most familiar with was their tolerance of eccentricity. This, he concluded, was simply the logical extension of that same rejection of coercion that so impressed the Jesuits in Quebec. If, he noted, a Winnebago decided that gods or spirits did not really exist and refused to perform rituals meant to appease them, or even if he declared the collective wisdom of the elders wrong and invented his own personal cosmology (and both these things did, quite regularly, happen), such a sceptic would definitely be made fun of, while his closest friends and family might worry lest the gods punish him in some way. However, it would never occur to them to punish him, or that anyone should try to force him into conformity – for instance, by blaming him for a bad hunt and therefore refusing to share food with him until he agreed to perform the usual rituals.
雷丁本人也被同时代的人认为是个怪人(他总是避免得到一份正式的学术工作;在芝加哥的传说中,当他有一次获得那里的教学奖学金时,他在第一次讲课前被吓坏了,于是他立即走到附近的公路上,想办法被车撞断了腿,然后在医院里快乐地读完了剩下的学期)。也许不是巧合,他最熟悉的 “原始” 社会真正打动他的是他们对怪异的容忍。他的结论是,这仅仅是的逻辑延伸,这种拒绝强制的做法给魁北克的耶稣会士留下了深刻印象。他指出,如果一个温尼贝戈人认为神灵并不真正存在,并拒绝举行旨在安抚他们的仪式,或者甚至如果他宣布长者的集体智慧是错误的,并发明了自己的个人宇宙观(这两件事确实经常发生),这样一个怀疑论者肯定会被取笑,而他最亲密的朋友和家人可能会担心,以免神灵以某种方式惩罚他。然而,他们永远不会想到要惩罚他,或者有人会试图强迫他服从 —— 例如,通过指责他打猎不力,因此拒绝与他分享食物,直到他同意执行通常的仪式。
There is every reason to believe that sceptics and non-conformists exist in every human society; what varies is how others react to them.32 Radin was interested in the intellectual consequences, the kind of speculative systems of thought such out-of-sync characters might create. Others have noted the political implications. It’s often people who are just slightly odd who become leaders; the truly odd can become spiritual figures, but, even more, they can and often do serve as a kind of reserve of potential talent and insight that can be called on in the event of a crisis or unprecedented turn of affairs. Thomas Beidelman, for instance, observes that among the early-twentieth-century Nuer – a cattle-keeping people of South Sudan, famous for their rejection of anything that resembled government – there were politicians and village ‘bulls’ (‘operator types’ we’d now call them) who played fast and loose with the rules, but also ‘earth priests’ who mediated local disputes, and finally prophets. The politicians were often unconventional: for instance, it was not uncommon for the local ‘bull’ actually to be a woman whose parents had declared her a man for social purposes; the priests were always outsiders to the region; but the prophet was an altogether more extreme kind of figure. He might dribble, drool, maintain a vacant stare, act like an epileptic; or engage in long but pointless tasks such as spending hours arranging shells into designs on the ground in the bush; or long periods in the wilderness; or he may even eat excrement or ashes. Prophets, as Beidelman notes, ‘may speak in tongues, go into trances, fast, balance on their head, wear feathers in their hair, be active by night rather than by day, and may perch on rooftops. Some sit with tethering pegs up their anuses.’33 Many, too, were physically deformed. Some were cross-dressers, or given to unconventional sexual practices.
我们完全有理由相信,怀疑论者和不守规矩者存在于每个人类社会;不同的是其他人对他们的反应。32雷丁对智力方面的后果感兴趣,即这种不合群的人物可能创造的那种推测性的思想体系。其他人则注意到政治上的影响。往往是那些稍微古怪的人成为领导者;真正古怪的人可以成为精神人物,但更多的是,他们可以而且经常作为一种潜在人才和洞察力的储备,在发生危机或前所未有的事务转变时可以被调用。例如,托马斯·贝德尔曼观察到,在二十世纪早期的努埃尔人(南苏丹的一个养牛民族,因拒绝任何类似政府的东西而闻名)中,有政治家和村里的 “公牛”(我们现在称他们为 “经营者类型”),他们玩弄规则,但也有调解地方争端的 “土牧师”,最后还有先知们。政治家往往是非常规的:例如,当地的 “公牛” 实际上是一个女人,但她的父母为了社会目的宣布她是一个男人,这种情况并不罕见;祭司总是该地区的外来者;但先知是一种更加极端的人物。他可能会滴水,流口水,保持空洞的眼神,表现得像个癫痫病人;或者从事冗长但毫无意义的工作,比如花几个小时在灌木丛中的地上把贝壳排列成图案;或者长期在旷野中工作;或者他甚至可能吃粪便或灰烬。正如贝德尔曼所指出的,“先知们可能会说方言,进入恍惚状态,禁食,在头上保持平衡,头发上戴着羽毛,在夜间而不是在白天活动,并可能栖息在屋顶上。有些人的肛门上拴着钉子,坐在那里。”33还有许多人,身体畸形。有些人是变装者,或有非常规的性行为。
In other words, these were seriously unorthodox people. The impression one gets from the literature is that any Nuer settlement of pre-colonial times was likely to be complemented by a minor penumbra of what might be termed extreme individuals; ones who in our own society would likely be classified as anything from highly eccentric or defiantly queer to neurodivergent or mentally ill. Normally, prophets were treated with bemused respect. They were ill; but the illness was a direct consequence of being touched by God. As a result, when great calamities or unprecedented events occurred – a plague, a foreign invasion – it was among this penumbra that everyone looked for a charismatic leader appropriate to the occasion. As a result, a person who might otherwise have spent his life as something analogous to the village idiot would suddenly be found to have remarkable powers of foresight and persuasion; even to be capable of inspiring new social movements among the youth or co-ordinating elders across Nuerland to put aside their differences and mobilize around some common goal; even, sometimes, to propose entirely different visions of what Nuer society might be like.
换句话说,这些人是严重非正统的人。从文献中得到的印象是,在殖民时代之前的任何努埃尔人定居点,都可能有一个小半边天,他们可能被称为极端分子;在我们自己的社会中,他们可能被归类为从高度古怪或轻蔑的同性恋到神经失调或精神疾病的任何东西。通常情况下,预言家们会受到困惑的尊重。他们有病;但这种病是被上帝触摸的直接后果。因此,当巨大的灾难或史无前例的事件发生时 —— 瘟疫、外国入侵 —— 每个人都在这个半边天中寻找适合这个场合的有魅力的领袖。结果,一个本来可能一辈子都是类似于村里的白痴的人,突然被发现具有非凡的预见力和说服力;甚至能够在年轻人中激发新的社会运动,或者协调整个努埃尔地区的长者,让他们放下分歧,围绕一些共同的目标动员起来;甚至,有时,提出完全不同的努埃尔社会可能是什么样子的愿景。
Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the few mid-twentieth-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals; hence his famous argument in The Savage Mind that mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of ‘neolithic science’ as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles. Less well known – but more relevant to the problems we are grappling with here – are some of his early writings on politics.
克劳德·列维·斯特劳斯是二十世纪中期少数几个认真对待早期人类与我们智力相当这一观点的人类学家之一;因此他在《野蛮人的思想》中提出了著名的论点,即神话思想,与其说是代表某种前逻辑的朦胧,不如说是一种与我们的科学一样复杂的 “新石器时代科学”,只是建立在不同的原则之上。不太为人所知 —— 但与我们在这里努力解决的问题更相关 —— 是他早期关于政治的一些著作。
In 1944, Lévi-Strauss published an essay about politics among the Nambikwara, a small population of part-time farmers, part-time foragers inhabiting a notoriously inhospitable stretch of savannah in northwest Mato Grosso, Brazil. The Nambikwara then had a reputation as extremely simple folk, given their very rudimentary material culture. For this reason, many treated them almost as a direct window on to the Palaeolithic. This, Lévi-Strauss pointed out, was a mistake. People like the Nambikwara live in the shadow of the modern state, trading with farmers and city people and sometimes hiring themselves out as labourers. Some might even be descendants of runaways from cities or plantations. Still, he noted, their ways of organizing their lives could be seen as a source of insights into more general features of the human condition, especially as these pertain to politics.
1944 年,列维·斯特劳斯发表了一篇关于 Nambikwara 的政治的文章,这是一个由兼职农民和兼职觅食者组成的小群体,居住在巴西马托格罗索省西北部一片臭名昭著的荒凉草原上。鉴于他们非常简陋的物质文化,Nambikwara 人当时被誉为极其简单的民俗。由于这个原因,许多人几乎把他们当作直接了解旧石器时代的一个窗口。莱维·斯特劳斯指出,这是个错误。像 Nambikwara 这样的人生活在现代国家的阴影下,与农民和城市人进行交易,有时还把自己雇来当工人。有些人甚至可能是来自城市或种植园的逃亡者的后代。不过,他指出,他们组织生活的方式可以被看作是对人类条件的更普遍特征的洞察力的来源,特别是当这些与政治有关的时候。
For Lévi-Strauss, what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were averse to competition (they had little wealth to compete over anyway), they did appoint chiefs to lead them. The very simplicity of the resulting arrangement, he felt, might expose ‘some basic functions’ of political life that ‘remain hidden in more complex and elaborate systems of government’. Not only was the role of the chief socially and psychologically quite similar to that of a national politician or statesman in European society, he noted, it also attracted similar personality types: people who ‘unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward’.34
对列维·斯特劳斯来说,Nambikwara 人特别具有启发性的是,尽管他们不喜欢竞争(反正他们没有什么财富可供竞争),但他们确实任命了酋长来领导他们。他认为,这种简单的安排可能会暴露出政治生活的 “一些基本功能”,而这些功能 “在更复杂的政府系统中是隐藏的”。他指出,酋长的角色不仅在社会和心理上与欧洲社会中的国家政治家或政治家相当相似,而且还吸引了类似的人格类型:“与他们的大多数同伴不同,他们为了自己的利益而享受声望,对责任感有强烈的吸引力,而且对他们来说,公共事务的负担会带来自己的回报。34
Modern politicians play the role of wheelers and dealers, brokering alliances or negotiating compromises between different constituencies or interest groups. In Nambikwara society this didn’t happen much because there weren’t really many differences in wealth or status. However, chiefs did play an analogous role, brokering between two entirely different social and ethical systems, which obtained at different times of year. Allow us to explain. In the 1940s, the Nambikwara lived in what were effectively two very different societies. During the rainy season, they occupied hilltop villages of several hundred people and practised horticulture; during the rest of the year they dispersed into small foraging bands. Chiefs made or lost their reputations by acting as heroic leaders during the ‘nomadic adventures’ of the dry season, during which times they typically gave orders, resolved crises and behaved in what would at any other time be considered an unacceptably authoritarian manner; in the wet season, a time of much greater ease and abundance, they relied on those reputations to attract followers to settle around them in villages, where they employed only gentle persuasion and led by example to guide their followers in the construction of houses and tending of gardens. In doing so they cared for the sick and needy, mediated disputes and never imposed anything on anyone.
现代政治家扮演的是商人的角色,在不同的选区或利益集团之间斡旋结盟或谈判妥协。在 Nambikwara 社会中,这种情况并不多见,因为财富或地位的差异其实并不大。然而,酋长确实发挥了类似的作用,在两个完全不同的社会和道德体系之间进行斡旋,而这两个体系在一年中的不同时期获得。请允许我们解释一下。在 20 世纪 40 年代,Nambikwara 人实际上生活在两个非常不同的社会中。在雨季,他们占据着几百人的山顶村庄,从事园艺工作;在一年的其他时间,他们分散成小型的觅食队伍。酋长们在旱季的 “游牧冒险” 中扮演英雄领袖的角色,从而赢得或失去了他们的声誉。在旱季,他们通常发号施令,解决危机,并以,这在其他任何时候都会被认为是一种不可接受的专制方式;在雨季,一个更加轻松和丰富的时期,他们依靠这些声誉来吸引追随者在他们周围的村庄定居,他们只采用温和的劝说和以身作则的方式来指导追随者建造房屋和打理花园。在此过程中,他们关心病人和穷人,调解争端,从不对任何人强加任何东西。
How should we think about these chiefs? They were not patriarchs, Lévi-Strauss concluded; neither were they petty tyrants (even though for certain limited periods they were allowed to act as such); and there was no sense in which they were invested with mystical powers. More than anything, they resembled modern politicians operating tiny embryonic welfare states, pooling resources and doling them out to those in need. What impressed Lévi-Strauss above all was their political maturity. It was the chiefs’ skill in directing small bands of dry-season foragers, of making snap decisions in crises (crossing a river, directing a hunt) that later qualified them to play the role of mediators and diplomats in the village plaza. But in doing so they were effectively moving back and forth, each year, between what evolutionary anthropologists (in the tradition of Turgot) insist on thinking of as totally different stages of social development: from hunters and foragers to farmers and back again.
我们应该如何看待这些酋长?莱维·斯特劳斯总结说,他们不是族长;他们也不是小暴君(尽管在某些有限的时期内,他们被允许这样做);而且在任何意义上,他们都没有被赋予神秘的力量。更重要的是,他们类似于现代的政治家,经营着微小的福利国家的雏形,汇集资源并将其分配给需要的人。最让列维·斯特劳斯印象深刻的是他们的政治成熟度。正是酋长们指挥小股旱季觅食者的技能,以及在危机中做出快速决定(渡河、指挥狩猎)的技能,使他们后来有资格在村庄广场上扮演调解人和外交官的角色。但在这样做的过程中,他们每年都在进化人类学家(按照杜尔哥的传统)坚持认为的社会发展的完全不同阶段之间来回穿梭:从猎人和觅食者到农民,然后再回来。
It was precisely this quality that made the Nambikwara chief such a peculiarly familiar political figure: the calm sophistication with which he shifted between what were in effect two different social systems, all the while balancing a sense of personal ambition with the common good. These chiefs were in every sense self-conscious political actors. And it was their flexibility and adaptability that enabled them to take such a distanced perspective on whichever system obtained at any given time.
恰恰是这种品质使南比瓜拉酋长成为一个特别熟悉的政治人物:他在实际上是两种不同的社会制度之间冷静地进行转换,同时兼顾个人野心和共同利益。这些酋长在各种意义上都是自觉的政治行为者。正是他们的灵活性和适应性,使他们能够在任何特定的时间对任何一种制度采取如此远距离的观点。
Although Lévi-Strauss went on to become the world’s most renowned anthropologist and perhaps the most famous intellectual in France, his early essay on Nambikwara leadership fell into almost instant obscurity. To this day, very few outside the field of Amazonian studies have heard of it. One reason is that in the post-war decades, Lévi-Strauss was moving in exactly the opposite direction to the rest of his discipline. Where he emphasized similarities between the lives of hunters, horticulturalists and modern industrial democracies, almost everyone else – and particularly everyone interested in foraging societies – was embracing new variations on Turgot, though with updated language and backed up by a flood of hard scientific data. Throwing away old-fashioned distinctions between ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’, which were beginning to sound a little too condescending, they settled on a new sequence, which ran from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’ to ‘chiefdoms’ to ‘states’. The culmination of this trend was the landmark Man the Hunter symposium, held at the University of Chicago in 1966. This framed hunter-gatherer studies in terms of a new discipline which its attendees proposed to call ‘behavioural ecology’, starting with rigorously quantified studies of African savannah and rainforest groups – the Kalahari San, Eastern Hadza and Mbuti Pygmies – including calorie counts, time allocation studies and all sorts of data that simply hadn’t been available to earlier researchers.
尽管列维·斯特劳斯后来成为世界上最著名的人类学家,也许是法国最著名的知识分子,但他早期关于南比瓜拉领导力的文章几乎立即陷入了沉寂。时至今日,在亚马逊研究领域之外,很少有人听说过这篇文章。其中一个原因是,在战后的几十年里,列维·斯特劳斯正朝着与他的学科其他部分完全相反的方向发展。他强调猎人、园艺家和现代工业民主国家的生活,而几乎所有其他人 —— 特别是对觅食社会感兴趣的人 —— 都在接受涂尔干的新变化,尽管使用了最新的语言,并有大量的科学数据支持。他们抛弃了老式的 “野蛮”、“未开化” 和 “文明” 之间的区别,这些区别开始听起来有点过于居高临下,他们确定了一个新的顺序,即从 “部落” 到 “酋长国” 到 “国家”。这一趋势的高潮是 1966 年在芝加哥大学举行的具有里程碑意义的 “猎人”(Man the Hunter) 研讨会。该研讨会将狩猎者·采集者的研究框定在一门新的学科上,与会者建议称之为 “行为生态学”,从对非洲草原和雨林群体 —— 卡拉哈里山人、东部哈德扎人和姆布迪俾格米人 —— 的严格量化研究开始,包括卡路里计数、时间分配研究和各种早期研究者根本没有的数据。
The new studies overlapped with a sudden upswing of popular interest in just these same African societies: for instance, the famous short films about the Kalahari Bushmen by the Marshalls (an American family of anthropologists and film-makers), which became fixtures of introductory anthropology courses and educational television across the world, along with best-selling books like Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People . Before long, it was simply assumed by almost everyone that foragers represented a separate stage of social development, that they ‘live in small groups’, ‘move around a lot’, reject any social distinctions other than those of age and gender, and resolve conflicts by ‘fission’ rather than arbitration or violence.35 The fact that these African societies were, in some cases at least, refugee populations living in places no one else wanted, or that many foraging societies documented in the ethnographic record (who had by this time been largely wiped out by European settler colonialism and were thus no longer available for quantitative analysis) were nothing like this, was occasionally acknowledged. But it was rarely treated as particularly relevant. The image of tiny egalitarian bands corresponded perfectly to what those weaned on the legacy of Rousseau felt hunter-gatherers ought to have been like. Now there seemed to be hard, quantifiable scientific data (and also movies!) to back it up.
新的研究与大众对这些非洲社会的兴趣突然上升相重叠:例如,马绍尔(美洲人类学家和电影制片人家族)拍摄的关于卡拉哈里布须曼人的著名短片,成为世界各地人类学入门课程和教育电视的固定内容,同时还有科林·特恩布尔的《森林人》等畅销书。不久之后,几乎所有人都简单地认为,觅食者代表了社会发展的一个独立阶段,他们 “生活在小团体中”,“经常走动”,拒绝除年龄和性别之外的任何社会区分,并通过 “裂变” 而不是仲裁或暴力解决冲突。35这些非洲社会至少在某些情况下是生活在无人问津的地方的难民人口,或者民族学记录中记载的许多觅食社会(此时已被欧洲定居者殖民主义基本消灭,因此不再可用于定量分析)与此完全不同,这一事实偶尔被承认。但它很少被视为特别相关。小小的平等主义队伍的形象完全符合那些在卢梭遗产下长大的人认为狩猎采集者应该是什么样的。现在似乎有硬的、可量化的科学数据(还有电影!)来支持它。
In this new reality, Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara were simply irrelevant. After all, in evolutionary terms they weren’t even really foragers, since they only roamed about in foraging bands for seven or eight months a year. So the apparent paradox that their larger village settlements were egalitarian while their foraging bands were anything but could be ignored, lest it tarnish this crisp new picture. The kind of political self-consciousness which seemed so self-evident in Nambikwara chiefs, let alone the wild improvisation expected of Nuer prophets, had no place in the revised framework of human social evolution.
在这个新的现实中,列维·斯特劳斯的 Nambikwara 根本无关紧要。毕竟,从进化的角度来看,他们甚至不是真正的觅食者,因为他们每年只在七八个月的时间里带着觅食队伍四处游荡。因此,他们较大的村庄定居点是平等主义的,而他们的觅食队却什么都不是,这种明显的矛盾可以忽略不计,以免它玷污了这幅清晰的新画。在 Nambikwara 酋长身上似乎不言而喻的那种政治自觉,更不用说努尔族先知们所期望的疯狂的即兴创作了,在人类社会进化的修订框架中没有位置。
The twentieth-century Nambikwara, Winnebago or Nuer cannot provide us with direct windows on the past. What they can do is suggest angles of investigation we might not otherwise have thought to look for. After considering their social systems, it seems self-evident to ask if, in early human societies, there is evidence for seasonal variations of social structure; or if highly anomalous individuals were not only treated with respect, but played important political roles in the Palaeolithic period. As it turns out, the answer in both cases is ‘yes’. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming.
二十世纪的 Nambikwara、Winnebago 或 Nuer 不能为我们提供了解过去的直接窗口。他们能做的是提出我们可能没有想到要去寻找的调查角度。在考虑了他们的社会体系之后,似乎不言而喻地要问,在早期人类社会中,是否有证据表明社会结构的季节性变化;或者高度反常的个人是否不仅受到尊重,而且在旧石器时代发挥了重要的政治作用。事实证明,这两种情况下的答案都是 “是”。事实上,证据是压倒性的。
Let’s return to those rich Upper Palaeolithic burials, so often interpreted as evidence for the emergence of ‘inequality’, or even hereditary nobility of some sort. For some odd reason, those who make such arguments never seem to notice – or, if they do, to attach much significance to the fact – that a quite remarkable number of these skeletons (indeed, a majority) bear evidence of striking physical anomalies that could only have marked them out, clearly and dramatically, from their social surroundings.36 The adolescent boys in both Sunghir and Dolní Věstonice, for instance, had pronounced congenital deformities; the bodies in the Romito Cave in Calabria were unusually short, with at least one case of dwarfism; while those in Grimaldi Cave were extremely tall even by our standards, and must have seemed veritable giants to their contemporaries.
让我们回到那些丰富的旧石器时代的墓葬,它们经常被解释为 “不平等” 的证据,甚至是某种世袭贵族的出现。出于某种奇怪的原因,那些提出这种论点的人似乎从来没有注意到 —— 或者说,如果他们注意到了,也没有对这一事实给予多大的重视 —— 这些骨骼中有相当多的(实际上是大多数)带有惊人的身体异常的证据,这只能将他们从他们的社会环境中清楚地、戏剧性地标出来。36例如,Sunghir 和 Dolní Věstonice 的青少年男孩都有明显的先天性畸形;卡拉布里亚 Romito 洞的,尸体异常矮小,至少有一例侏儒症;而 Grimaldi 洞的尸体即使按照我们的标准也是非常高的,对他们同时代的人来说一定是名副其实的巨人。
All this seems very unlikely to be a coincidence. In fact, it makes one wonder whether even those bodies, which appear from their skeletal remains to be anatomically typical, might have been equally striking in some other way; after all, an albino, for example, or an epileptic prophet given to dividing his time between hanging upside down and arranging and rearranging snail shells would not be identifiable as such from the archaeological record. We can’t know much about the day-to-day lives of Palaeolithic individuals buried with rich grave goods, other than that they seem to have been as well fed and cared for as anybody else; but we can at least suggest they were seen as the ultimate individuals, about as different from their peers as it was possible to be.
所有这些似乎都不太可能是一个巧合。事实上,这不禁让人怀疑,即使是那些从骨骼上看是典型的尸体,也可能在其他方面同样引人注目;毕竟,一个白化病患者,或者一个癫痫的先知,在倒吊和摆放蜗牛壳之间分配时间,从考古记录中是无法确定的。我们无法了解与丰富的墓葬物品埋在一起的旧石器时代的人的日常生活,除了他们似乎和其他人一样得到了很好的食物和照顾;但我们至少可以表明,他们被视为最终的个人,与他们的同龄人有可能的不同。
What does all this really tell us about social inequality in the last Ice Age? Well, first of all it suggests we might have to shelve any premature talk of the emergence of hereditary elites. It seems extremely unlikely that Palaeolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants and dwarfs. Second, we don’t know how much the treatment of such individuals after death had to do with their treatment in life. Another important point here is that we are not dealing with a case of some people being buried with rich grave goods and others being buried with none. Rather it is a case of some people being buried with rich grave goods, and most others not being buried at all.37 The very practice of burying bodies intact, and clothed, appears to have been exceptional in the Upper Palaeolithic. Most corpses were treated in completely different ways: de-fleshed, broken up, curated, or even processed into jewellery and artefacts. (In general, Palaeolithic people were clearly much more at home with human body parts than we are.)
所有这一切到底告诉我们关于最后一个冰河时代的社会不平等是什么?首先,它表明我们可能要搁置任何关于世袭精英出现的过早讨论。旧石器时代的欧洲似乎不太可能产生一个分层的精英阶层,而这个精英阶层恰好主要由驼背、巨人和侏儒组成。其次,我们不知道这些人死后的待遇与他们生前的待遇有多大关系。这里的另一个重要问题是,我们处理的不是一些人被埋葬时有丰富的墓葬物品,而另一些人被埋葬时没有。相反,这是一个有些人被埋葬在丰富的墓穴中,而其他大多数人根本就没有被埋葬。37在旧石器时代上部,完整地埋葬尸体和穿上衣服的做法似乎是一种例外。大多数尸体的处理方式是完全不同的:去肉、打碎、策划,甚至加工成珠宝和工艺品。(总的来说,旧石器时代的人显然比我们更善于处理人体器官。)
The corpse in its complete and articulated form – and the clothed corpse even more so – was clearly something unusual and, one would presume, inherently strange. Some important circumstantial evidence reinforces this. In many such cases, an effort was made to contain the bodies of the Upper Palaeolithic dead by covering them with heavy objects: mammoth scapulae, wooden planks, stones or tight bindings. Perhaps saturating them with clothing, weapons and ornaments was an extension of these concerns, celebrating but also containing something potentially dangerous. This too makes sense. The ethnographic record abounds with examples of anomalous beings – human or otherwise – treated as both exalted and dangerous; or one way in life, another in death.
完整的、有关节的尸体 —— 有衣服的尸体更是如此 —— 显然是不寻常的东西,而且,人们推测,它本身就很奇怪。一些重要的间接证据加强了这一点。在许多这样的情况下,人们努力用重物覆盖上旧石器时代死者的尸体:猛犸象的肩胛骨、木板、石头或紧紧的捆绑。也许用衣服、武器和装饰品填充他们是这些关注的延伸,庆祝但也包含一些潜在的危险。这也是有道理的。民族志中有很多关于异常生物 —— 人类或其他生物 —— 被视为既高尚又危险的例子;或者生前是这样,死后又是那样。
Much here is speculation. There are any number of other interpretations that could be placed on the evidence – though the idea that these tombs mark the emergence of some sort of hereditary aristocracy seems the least likely of all. Those interred were extraordinary, ‘extreme’ individuals. The way they were treated – and here we are speaking not only about the ostentatious display of riches, but that their corpses were decorated, displayed and buried to begin with – marked them out as equally extraordinary in death. Anomalous in almost every respect, such burials can hardly be interpreted as proxies for social structure among the living. On the other hand, they clearly have something to do with all the contemporary evidence for music, sculpture, painting and complex architecture. What is one to make of them?
这里有很多是猜测。有许多其他的解释可以放在这些证据上 —— 尽管这些坟墓标志着某种世袭贵族的出现的想法似乎是最不可能的。那些被埋葬的人是不寻常的、“极端的” 个人。他们被对待的方式 —— 这里我们说的不仅是炫耀性的财富展示,而且他们的尸体一开始就被装饰、展示和埋葬 —— 标志着他们在死后也同样不寻常。在几乎所有方面都很反常的情况下,这样的墓葬很难被解释为活人中社会结构的代用品。另一方面,它们显然与所有当代音乐、雕塑、绘画和复杂建筑的证据有关。我们该如何看待它们呢?
This is where seasonality comes into the picture.
这就是季节性问题的体现。
Almost all the Ice Age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that lived a little like Lévi-Strauss’s Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another. True, they didn’t gather to plant crops. Rather, the large Upper Palaeolithic sites are linked to migrations and seasonal hunting of game herds – woolly mammoth, steppe bison or reindeer – as well as cyclical fish-runs and nut harvests. This seems to be the explanation for those hubs of activity found in eastern Europe at places like Dolní Věstonice, where people took advantage of an abundance of wild resources to feast, engage in complex rituals and ambitious artistic projects, and trade minerals, marine shells and furs. In western Europe, equivalents would be the great rock shelters of the French Périgord and the Cantabrian coast, with their deep records of human activity, which similarly formed part of an annual round of seasonal congregation and dispersal.38
几乎所有具有非凡的墓葬和纪念性建筑的冰河时代遗址都是由有点像列维·斯特劳斯的 Nambikwara 的社会创造的,他们在一年中的某个时候分散成觅食队,在另一个时候聚集在集中的定居点里。诚然,他们并没有聚集在一起种植庄稼。相反,大型的上旧石器时代遗址与迁移和季节性的猎物群 —— 长毛象、草原野牛或驯鹿 —— 以及周期性的跑鱼和坚果收获有关。这似乎是对东欧 Dolní Věstonice 等地发现的那些活动中心的解释,在那里,人们利用丰富的野生资源大吃大喝,举行复杂的仪式和雄心勃勃的艺术项目,并交易矿物、海洋贝壳和毛皮。在西欧,与之对应的是法国佩里戈尔和坎塔布里亚海岸的大型岩穴,它们对人类活动有着深刻的记录,同样构成了每年一轮的季节性聚集和分散的一部分。38
Archaeology also shows that patterns of seasonal variation lie behind the monuments of Göbekli Tepe. Activities around the stone temples correspond with periods of annual superabundance, between midsummer and autumn, when large herds of gazelle descended on to the Harran Plain. At such times, people also gathered at the site to process massive quantities of nuts and wild cereal grasses, making these into festive foods, which presumably fuelled the work of construction.39 There is some evidence to suggest that each of these great structures had a relatively short lifespan, culminating in an enormous feast, after which its walls were rapidly filled in with leftovers and other refuse: hierarchies raised to the sky, only to be swiftly torn down again. Ongoing research is likely to complicate this picture, but the overall pattern of seasonal congregation for festive labour seems well established.
考古学还表明,季节性变化的模式隐藏在戈拜克利特佩的遗迹背后。石庙周围的活动,与每年仲夏和秋季的丰收期相吻合,这时大量的羚羊群来到了哈兰平原。在这种时候,人们也会聚集在现场,加工大量的坚果和野生谷草,将其制成节日食品,这大概是建筑工作的燃料。39有一些证据表明,这些伟大的建筑都有一个相对较短的寿命,在一次巨大的盛宴中达到顶峰,之后其墙壁迅速被剩菜和其他垃圾填满:等级制度被提升到了天上,只是很快又被拆掉了。正在进行的研究可能会使这一情况复杂化,但节日劳动的季节性聚集的总体模式似乎已经确立。
Such oscillating patterns of life endured long after the invention of agriculture. To take just one example, they may be key to understanding the famous Neolithic monuments of Salisbury Plain in England, and not just because the arrangements of standing stones themselves seem to function (among other things) as giant calendars. Stonehenge, framing the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, is the most famous of these. It turns out to have been the last in a long sequence of ceremonial structures, erected over the course of centuries in timber as well as stone, as people converged on the plain from remote corners of the British Isles at significant times of year. Careful excavation shows that many of these structures – now plausibly interpreted as monuments to the ancestors of a Neolithic aristocracy – were dismantled just a few generations after their construction.40
这种振荡的生活模式在农业发明后长期存在。仅举一例,它们可能是理解英格兰索尔兹伯里平原上著名的新石器时代纪念碑的关键,而不仅仅是因为立石的排列本身似乎具有巨大的日历功能(除其他外)。巨石阵是其中最著名的,它将仲夏的日出和仲冬的日落定格在一起。事实证明,它是一长串仪式建筑中的最后一个,是在几个世纪的时间里用木材和石头建造的,因为人们在一年中的重要时刻从不列颠群岛的偏远角落聚集在平原上。仔细的挖掘表明,这些建筑中的许多 —— 现在可以解释为新石器时代贵族祖先的纪念碑 —— 在建成后的几代人中就被拆除了。40
Still more striking, the people who built Stonehenge were not farmers, or not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: abandoning the cultivation of cereals and returning, from around 3300 BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people – with its own Woodhenge – in winter, but largely empty and abandoned in summer. The builders of Stonehenge seem to have been neither foragers nor herders, but something in between.41
更引人注目的是,建造巨石阵的人不是农民,或者说不是通常意义上的农民。他们曾经是农民;但在竖立和拆除宏伟纪念碑的过程中,英国人从欧洲大陆采用了新石器时代的农业经济,似乎至少在一个关键方面背弃了它:放弃了谷物的种植,从公元前 3300 年左右开始,回归到采集榛子作为其主要的植物食物来源。另一方面,他们保留了他们的家猪和牛群,在附近的 Durrington Walls 季节性地享用它们,Durrington Walls 是一个繁荣的城镇,冬天有几千人,有自己的 Woodhenge,但在夏天基本上是空的,被遗弃的。巨石阵的建造者似乎既不是觅食者也不是牧民,而是介于两者之间的人。41
All this is crucial because it’s hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foragers who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal-farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way. How could such a decision have been made? We’ll never know, but Stonehenge itself provides something of a hint since it is built of extremely large stones, some of which (the ‘bluestones’) were transported from as far away as Wales, while many of the cattle and pigs consumed at Durrington Walls were laboriously herded there from other distant locations.42
这一切都很关键,因为很难想象放弃农业除了是一个自觉的决定外,还能有什么其他原因。没有证据表明一个人口取代了另一个人口,也没有证据表明农民在某种程度上被强大的觅食者压倒,迫使他们放弃他们的作物。英格兰的新石器时代居民似乎已经衡量了谷物种植,并集体决定他们更愿意以另一种方式生活。这样的决定是如何做出的?我们永远不会知道,但巨石阵本身提供了一些提示,因为它是由非常大的石头建成的,其中一些石头(“蓝石”)是从远在威尔士的地方运来的,而杜林顿墙所消费的许多牛和猪都是从其他遥远的地方辛苦地赶来的。42
In other words, and remarkable as it may seem, even in the third millennium BC co-ordination of some sort was clearly possible across large parts of the British Isles. If Stonehenge was a shrine to exalted founders of a ruling clan – as some archaeologists now argue – it seems likely that members of their lineage claimed significant, even cosmic roles by virtue of their involvement in such events. On the other hand, patterns of seasonal aggregation and dispersal raise another question: if there were kings and queens at Stonehenge, exactly what sort could they have been? After all, these would have been kings whose courts and kingdoms existed for only a few months of the year, and otherwise dispersed into small communities of nut gatherers and stock herders. If they possessed the means to marshal labour, pile up food resources and provender armies of year-round retainers, what sort of royalty would consciously elect not to do so?
换句话说,尽管看起来很了不起,但即使在公元前 3000 年,在不列颠群岛的大部分地区,某种形式的协调显然是可能的。如果巨石阵是一个统治氏族的崇高创始人的圣地 —— 正如一些考古学家现在所认为的那样 —— 那么他们的家族成员似乎有可能因为参与了这些活动而声称自己扮演了重要的甚至是通用的角色。另一方面,季节性聚集和分散的模式提出了另一个问题:如果巨石阵有国王和王后,他们到底是哪种人?毕竟,这些国王的宫廷和王国在一年中只存在几个月,否则就会分散到坚果采集者和牧民的小社区中。如果他们拥有调集劳动力、堆积食物资源和供养全年的家臣军队的手段,什么样的王室会有意识地选择不这样做?
Recall that for Lévi-Strauss, there was a clear link between seasonal variations of social structure and a certain kind of political freedom. The fact that one structure applied in the rainy season and another in the dry allowed Nambikwara chiefs to view their own social arrangements at one remove: to see them as not simply ‘given’, in the natural order of things, but as something at least partially open to human intervention. The case of the British Neolithic – with its alternating phases of dispersal and monumental construction – indicates just how far such intervention could sometimes go.
回顾一下,对列维·斯特劳斯来说,社会结构的季节性变化与某种政治自由之间存在着明确的联系。一种结构适用于雨季,另一种结构适用于旱季,这一事实使南比瓜拉酋长能够从一个角度看待他们自己的社会 :把它们看作不是简单的 “给定”,在事物的自然秩序中,而是至少部分地对人类干预开放的东西。英国新石器时代的情况 —— 其分散和纪念碑建设的交替阶段 —— 表明这种干预有时可以走多远。
Writing in the midst of the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss probably didn’t think he was saying anything all that extraordinary. For anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century, it was common knowledge that societies doing a great deal of hunting, herding or foraging were often arranged in such a ‘double morphology’ (as Lévi-Strauss’s great predecessor Marcel Mauss put it).43 Lévi-Strauss was simply highlighting some of the political implications. But these implications are important. What the existence of similar seasonal patterns in the Palaeolithic suggests is that from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities. It might be useful here to look back at this forgotten anthropological literature, with which Lévi-Strauss would have been intimately familiar, to get a sense of just how dramatic these seasonal differences might be.
莱维·斯特劳斯在第二次世界大战期间写作时,可能并不认为他说的是什么特别的东西。对于 20 世纪上半叶的人类学家来说,从事大量狩猎、放牧或觅食的社会往往被安排在这样一个 “双重形态” 中(正如列维·斯特劳斯的伟大前辈马塞尔·莫斯所说),这是一个常识。43列维·斯特劳斯只是强调了一些政治含义。但这些影响是重要的。旧石器时代类似的季节性模式的存在表明,从一开始,或者至少从我们可以追溯到这种事情开始,人类就在自觉地试验不同的社会可能性。在这里,回顾一下这些被遗忘的人类学文献可能是有益的,列维·斯特劳斯会非常熟悉这些文献,以了解这些季节性的差异可能有多大。
The key text here is Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat’s (1903) ‘Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo’. The authors begin by observing that the circumpolar Inuit ‘and likewise many other societies … have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’. In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive, sometimes even tyrannical power over their kin – much more so than the Nambikwara chiefs in the dry season. But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Arctic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. Then, Inuit gathered together to build great meeting houses of wood, whale rib and stone; within these houses, virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed. Wealth was shared, and husbands and wives exchanged partners under the aegis of Sedna, the Goddess of the Sea.44
这里的关键文本是马塞尔·莫斯和亨利·博沙特(1903)的《爱斯基摩人的季节性变化》。作者一开始就指出,环北极的因纽特人 “和许多其他社会一样…… 有两个社会结构,一个在夏天,一个在冬天,同时他们有两个法律和宗教体系”。在夏季,因纽特人分散成大约 20 或 30 人的队伍,去追逐淡水鱼、驯鹿和驯鹿,所有这些都在一个男性长老的领导下。在这一时期,财产具有占有性,族长对他们的亲属行使强制力,有时甚至是暴虐的权力 —— 在旱季比南比克瓦拉酋长的权力更大。但在漫长的冬季,当海豹和海象涌向北极岸边时,情况发生了戏剧性的逆转。然后,因纽特人聚集在一起,用木头、鲸鱼肋骨和石头建造巨大的会议厅;在这些会议厅里,平等、利他主义和集体生活的美德盛行。财富被分享,丈夫和妻子在海洋女神塞德娜的主持下交换伴侣。44
Mauss thought the Inuit were an ideal case study because, living in the Arctic, they were facing some of the most extreme environmental constraints it was possible to endure. Yet even in sub-Arctic conditions, Mauss calculated, physical considerations – availability of game, building materials and the like – explained at best 40 per cent of the picture. (Other circumpolar peoples, he noted, including close neighbours of the Inuit facing near-identical physical conditions, organized themselves quite differently.) To a large extent, he concluded, Inuit lived the way they did because they felt that’s how humans ought to live.
莫斯认为因纽特人是一个理想的案例研究,因为他们生活在北极地区,面临着一些可能忍受的最极端的环境限制。然而,根据莫斯的计算,即使在亚北极地区的条件下,物理因素 —— 猎物、建筑材料等的可用性 —— 最多能解释 40% 的情况。(他指出,其他环北极地区的民族,包括因纽特人的近邻,面对几乎相同的物理条件,他们的组织方式却截然不同。)他总结说,在很大程度上,因纽特人以他们的方式生活,因为他们认为人类应该这样生活。
Around the same time that Marcel Mauss was combing French libraries for everything that had ever been written about the Inuit, the German ethnologist Franz Boas was carrying out research on the Kwakiutl, indigenous hunter-gatherers of Canada’s Northwest Coast. Here, Boas discovered, it was winter – not summer – that was the time when society crystallized into its most hierarchical forms, and spectacularly so. Plank-built palaces sprang to life along the coastline of British Columbia, with hereditary nobles holding court over compatriots classified as commoners and slaves, and hosting the great banquets known as potlatch . Yet these aristocratic courts broke apart for the summer work of the fishing season, reverting to smaller clan formations – still ranked, but with entirely different and much less formal structures. In this case, people actually adopted different names in summer and winter – literally becoming someone else, depending on the time of year.45
大约就在马塞尔·莫斯在法国图书馆里搜寻所有关于因纽特人的文献的同时,德国民族学家弗朗茨·博斯正在对加拿大西北海岸的原住民狩猎采集者 Kwakiutl 进行研究。博厄斯发现,在这里,冬季 —— 而不是夏季 —— 是社会结晶为最有等级的形式的时候,而且非常壮观。在不列颠哥伦比亚省的海岸线上,由木板搭建的宫殿焕发出勃勃生机,世袭的贵族们对被归类为平民和奴隶的同胞们进行审判,并举办被称为 potlatch 的盛大宴会。然而,这些贵族法庭在夏季捕鱼季节的工作中分崩离析,恢复到较小的宗族形式 —— 仍然有等级,但结构完全不同,也不那么正式。在这种情况下,人们实际上在夏季和冬季采用不同的名字 —— 根据一年中的不同时间,实际上变成了另一个人。45
Emigrating to the US, Boas went on to become a professor at New York’s Columbia University, where he ended up training virtually everyone who was to make a name for themselves in American anthropology for the next half-century. One of his students, a Viennese-born ethnographer named Robert Lowie (who was also a close friend of Paul Radin, author of Primitive Man as Philosopher) did fieldwork among the Mandan-Hidatsa and Crow people of what are now Montana and Wyoming, and spent much of his career thinking through the political implications of seasonal variation among nineteenth-century tribal confederacies on the Great Plains.
移民到美洲后,博厄斯成为纽约哥伦比亚大学的教授,在那里,他几乎培养了接下来半个世纪里在美洲人类学界成名的所有人。他的学生之一,一位出生在维也纳的民族学家罗伯特·洛维(他也是《作为哲学家的原始人》的作者保罗·雷丁的密友)在现在的蒙大拿州和怀俄明州的曼丹·希达萨人和克罗人中进行实地考察,并在其职业生涯的大部分时间里思考大平原上 19 世纪部落联盟的季节性变化的政治含义。
Plains nations were one-time farmers who had largely abandoned cereal agriculture, after re-domesticating escaped Spanish horses and adopting a largely nomadic mode of life. In late summer and early autumn, small and highly mobile bands of Cheyenne and Lakota would congregate in large settlements to make logistical preparations for the buffalo hunt. At this most sensitive time of year they appointed a police force that exercised full coercive powers, including the right to imprison, whip or fine any offender who endangered the proceedings. Yet, as Lowie observed, this ‘unequivocal authoritarianism’ operated on a strictly seasonal and temporary basis. Once the hunting season – and the collective Sun Dance rituals that followed – were complete, such authoritarianism gave way to what he called ‘anarchic’ forms of organization, society splitting once again into small, mobile bands. Lowie’s observations are startling:
平原民族曾经是农民,在重新驯养逃亡的西班牙马匹并采取主要是游牧的生活方式后,他们基本上放弃了谷物农业。在夏末秋初,夏安人和拉科塔人的小型和高度流动的队伍,他们会聚集在大型定居点,为水牛狩猎做后勤准备。在这一年中最敏感的时刻,他们任命了一支警察部队,行使充分的强制权力,包括有权监禁、鞭打或罚款任何危及诉讼的罪犯。然而,正如洛维所观察到的,这种 “明确的威权主义” 是在严格的季节性和临时性基础上运作的。一旦狩猎季节 —— 以及随后的集体太阳舞仪式 —— 结束,这种专制主义就会让位于他所说的 “无政府” 的组织形式,社会再次分裂成小型的、流动的团体。洛伊的观察令人吃惊。
In order to ensure a maximum kill, a police force – either coinciding with a military club, or appointed ad hoc, or serving by virtue of clan affiliation – issued orders and restrained the disobedient. In most of the tribes they not only confiscated game clandestinely procured, but whipped the offender, destroyed his property, and, in case of resistance, killed him. The very same organisation which in a murder case would merely use moral suasion turned into an inexorable State agency during a buffalo drive. However … coercive measures extended considerably beyond the hunt: the soldiers also forcibly restrained braves intent on starting war parties that were deemed inopportune by the chief; directed mass migrations; supervised the crowds at a major festival; and might otherwise maintain law and order.46
为了确保最大限度的杀戮,一支警察部队 —— 或者与一个军事俱乐部同时存在,或者临时任命,或者凭借部族关系而服务 —— 发布命令,约束不听话的人。在大多数部落中,他们不仅没收秘密购买的猎物,而且还鞭打罪犯,毁坏其财产,在反抗的情况下将其杀死。在谋杀案中仅仅使用道德劝说的同一个组织,在驱赶水牛的过程中变成了一个不可阻挡的国家机构。然而…… 强制措施远远超出了狩猎的范围:士兵们还强行约束那些打算发动酋长认为不合适的战队的勇士们;指挥大规模的迁徙;监督重大节日的人群;并可能以其他方式维持法律和秩序。46
‘During a large part of the year,’ Lowie continued, ‘the tribe simply did not exist as such; and the families or minor unions of familiars that jointly sought a living required no special disciplinary organization. The soldiers were thus a concomitant of numerically strong aggregations, hence functioned intermittently rather than continuously.’ But the soldiers’ sovereignty, he stressed, was no less real for its temporary nature. As a result, Lowie insisted that Plains Indians did in fact know something of state power, even though they never actually developed a state.
“在一年中的大部分时间里”,洛维继续说,“部落根本不存在;而共同谋生的家庭或家族成员的小联盟不需要特别的纪律组织。因此,士兵是人数众多的群体的伴随物,因此,他们的功能是间歇性的,而不是持续性的。” 但他强调,士兵们的主权并没有因为其临时性而变得不真实。因此,洛维坚持认为,平原印第安人实际上对国家权力有所了解,尽管他们实际上从未发展出一个国家。
It’s easy to see why the neo-evolutionists of the 1950s and 1960s might not have known quite what to do with this legacy of fieldwork observations. They were arguing for the existence of discrete stages of political organization – successively: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states – and held that the stages of political development mapped, at least very roughly, on to similar stages of economic development: hunter-gatherers, gardeners, farmers, industrial civilization. It was confusing enough that people like the Nambikwara seemed to jump back and forth, over the course of the year, between economic categories. The Cheyenne, Crow, Assiniboine or Lakota would appear to jump regularly from one end of the political spectrum to the other. They were a kind of band/state amalgam. In other words, they threw everything askew.
很容易理解为什么 20 世纪 50 年代和 60 年代的新进化论者可能不知道该如何处理这些实地观察的遗产。他们主张政治组织存在不连续的阶段 —— 依次为:部落、部落、酋长国、国家 —— 并认为政治发展的阶段与经济发展的类似阶段相吻合,至少是非常。像南比克瓦拉人这样的人在一年中似乎在经济类别之间来回跳动,这已经很令人困惑了。夏安人、克罗人、阿西尼博因人或拉科塔人似乎经常从政治光谱的一端跳到另一端。他们是一种族群/国家的混合体。换句话说,他们把一切都搞乱了。
Still, Lowie is absolutely unequivocal on this point, and he was by no means the only anthropologist to observe it.47 Most interestingly for our own perspective, he too stressed that the Plains Indians were conscious political actors, keenly aware of the possibilities and dangers of authoritarian power. Not only did they dismantle all means of exercising coercive authority the moment the ritual season was over, they were also careful to rotate which clan or warrior clubs got to wield it: anyone holding sovereignty one year would be subject to the authority of others in the next.48
不过,洛维在这一点上是绝对明确的,而且他也绝不是唯一观察到这一点的人类学家。47对我们自己的观点来说,最有趣的是,他也强调平原印第安人是有意识的政治行为者,敏锐地意识到专制权力的可能性和危险性。他们不仅在祭祀季节结束时拆除所有行使强制权力的手段,而且还小心翼翼地轮流让哪个部族或战士俱乐部来行使权力:任何一年拥有主权的人在下一年都要服从其他人的权力。48
Scholarship does not always advance. Sometimes it slips backwards. A hundred years ago, most social scientists understood that those who live mainly from wild resources were not normally restricted to tiny ‘bands’. As we’ve seen, the assumption that they were only gained ground in the 1960s. In this regard, our earlier invocation of biker gangs and hippie communes wasn’t entirely whimsical. These were the images being bounced around in the popular imagination at that time, and invoked in debates about human nature. It’s surely no coincidence that the most popular ethnographic films of the post-war era either focused on the Kalahari Bushmen and Mbuti Pygmies (‘band’ societies, which could be imagined as roughly resembling hippie communes); or on the Yanomami or ‘fierce people’ (Amazonian horticulturalists who, in Napoleon Chagnon’s version of reality – but not, let’s recall, in Helena Valero’s – do bear a rather disturbing resemblance to Hell’s Angels).
学术研究并不总是进步。有时,它也会向后滑落。一百年前,大多数社会科学家都明白,那些主要靠野生资源为生的人通常不会被限制在很小的 “族群” 里。正如我们所看到的,他们的假设只是在 20 世纪 60 年代得到了支持。在这一点上,我们早先提到的骑自行车的团伙和嬉皮公社并不完全是异想天开。这些都是当时在大众想象中的形象,并在关于人性的辩论中被引用。战后最流行的人种学电影要么关注卡拉哈里布什曼人和姆布迪俾格米人(“族群” 社会,可以想象为与嬉皮公社大致相似),这当然不是巧合。或亚诺马米人或 “凶猛的人”(亚马逊园艺家,在拿破仑·查尼翁的现实版本中 —— 但不是,让我们回顾一下,在海伦娜·瓦莱罗的版本中 —— 确实与地狱天使有着相当令人不安的相似之处)。
Since in this new, evolutionist narrative ‘states’ were defined above all by their monopoly on the ‘legitimate use of coercive force’, the nineteenth-century Cheyenne or Lakota would have been seen as evolving from the ‘band’ level to the ‘state’ level roughly every November, and then devolving back again come spring. Obviously, this is silly. No one would seriously suggest such a thing. Still, it’s worth pointing out because it exposes the much deeper silliness of the initial assumption: that societies must necessarily progress through a series of evolutionary stages to begin with. You can’t speak of an evolution from band to tribe to chiefdom to state if your starting points are groups that move fluidly between them as a matter of habit.
由于在这种新的、进化论的叙述中,“国家” 首先被定义为对 “合法使用强制力” 的垄断,所以十九世纪的夏安人或拉科塔人将被视为大致在每年 11 月从 “部落” 一级进化到 “国家” 一级,然后在春天到来时再次演变回来。很明显,这是愚蠢的。没有人会认真建议这样的事情。但是,这仍然值得指出,因为它暴露了最初假设的更深层次的愚蠢:社会必须通过一系列的进化阶段来开始进步。如果你的出发点是作为一种习惯在它们之间流动的群体,那么你就不能说从族群到部落到酋长国的进化。
Seasonal dualism also throws into chaos more recent efforts at classifying hunter-gatherers into either ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ types, since what have been identified as the diagnostic features of ‘complexity’ – territoriality, social ranks, material wealth or competitive display – appear during certain seasons of the year, only to be brushed aside in others by the exact same population. Admittedly, most professional anthropologists nowadays have come to recognize that these categories are hopelessly inadequate, but the main effect of this acknowledgement has just been to cause them to change the subject, or suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t really be thinking about the broad sweep of human history at all any more. Nobody has yet proposed an alternative.
季节二元论也使最近将狩猎采集者分为 “简单” 或 “复杂” 类型的努力陷入混乱,因为那些被确定为 “复杂” 的诊断特征 —— 领地性、社会等级、物质财富或竞争展示 —— 在一年中的某些季节出现,而在其他季节却被完全相同的人群抛之脑后。诚然,如今大多数专业人类学家已经认识到这些分类是无可救药的,但这种承认的主要效果只是使他们改变了主题,或者暗示我们也许真的不应该再去思考人类历史的广泛性了。还没有人提出一个替代方案。
Meanwhile, as we’ve seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them – all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states.
同时,正如我们所看到的,考古证据堆积如山,表明在最后一个冰河时代的高度季节性环境中,我们的遥远祖先的行为很像因纽特人、南比瓜拉人或克罗人。他们在不同的社会安排之间来回转换,建造纪念碑,然后再关闭,允许在一年中的某些时间里兴起专制结构,然后再拆除它们 —— 所有这些,似乎都是基于这样的理解,即没有特定的社会秩序是固定的或不可改变的。同一个人可以在我们看来有时像一个族群,有时像一个部落,有时像至少有一些我们现在认为是国家的特征的东西中体验生活。
With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to both make and unmake the political worlds we live in. If nothing else, this explains the ‘princes’ and ‘princesses’ of the last Ice Age, who appear to show up, in such magnificent isolation, like characters in some kind of fairy tale or costume drama. Maybe they were almost literally so. If they reigned at all, then perhaps it was, like the ruling clans of Stonehenge, just for a season.49
有了这种体制上的灵活性,就有能力跳出任何特定结构的界限,进行反思;创造和解除我们生活的政治世界。如果不出意外,这就解释了上个冰河时代的 “王子” 和 “公主”,他们似乎出现了,在如此宏伟的孤立中,就像某种童话或古装剧中的人物。也许他们几乎就是这样。如果他们有统治权,那么也许就像巨石阵的统治家族一样,只是一个季节。49
If we are right, and if human beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again, the implications are profound. For one thing, it suggests that Pierre Clastres was quite right when he proposed that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so.
如果我们是对的,如果人类真的在过去 4 万年左右的时间里,在不同的社会组织形式之间来回穿梭,建立起等级制度,然后再将其拆除,其影响是深远的。首先,它表明,当皮埃尔·克拉斯特尔提出,在无国籍社会中,人们的政治自觉非但不比现在的人少,反而可能大大增强。
Clastres was another product of the 1960s. A student of Lévi-Strauss, he took to heart his master’s view of Amazonian chiefs as mature political actors. But Clastres was also an anarchist (he was ultimately kicked out of Lévi-Strauss’s research group on a flimsy pretext, involving unauthorized use of official stationery), and he took the argument much further. It wasn’t just that Amazonian chiefs were calculating politicians. They were calculating politicians forced to manoeuvre in a social environment apparently designed to ensure they could never exercise real political power. In the winter, the groups they led were tiny and inconsequential. In the summer, they didn’t ‘lead’ at all. Yes, their houses might have resembled social service dispensaries in modern welfare states; but as a result, in terms of material wealth, they were actually the poorest men in the village, since chiefs were expected constantly to give everything away. They were also expected to set an example by working much harder than everybody else. Even where they did have special privileges, like the Tupi or Nambikwara chiefs, who were the only men in their villages allowed to have multiple wives, the privilege was distinctly double-edged. The wives were held to be necessary to prepare feasts for the village. If any of those wives looked to other lovers, which it appears they ordinarily did, there was nothing much the chief could do about it, since he had to keep himself in everyone’s good graces to remain chief.
克拉斯特尔是 60 年代的另一个产物。作为列维·斯特劳斯的学生,他把他的老师关于亚马逊酋长是成熟的政治行为者的观点铭记于心。但克拉斯特尔也是一个无政府主义者(他最终被踢出了列维·斯特劳斯的研究小组,理由很不充分,涉及未经授权使用官方文具),而且他的论点要更进一步。这不仅仅是说亚马逊酋长是精打细算的政治家。他们是精打细算的政客,被迫在一个显然是为了确保他们永远无法行使真正的政治权力而设计的社会环境中进行周旋。在冬天,他们所领导的群体是微小的,无足轻重的。在夏天,他们根本就没有 “领导”。是的,他们的房子可能类似于现代福利国家的社会服务诊所;但结果是,就物质财富而言,他们实际上是村子里最穷的人,因为人们期望酋长不断地把所有东西送出去。他们还被期望通过比其他人更努力地工作来树立一个榜样。即使他们有特殊的特权,比如图皮族或南比克拉族的酋长,他们是村里唯一被允许有多个妻子的男人,但这种特权显然是双刃剑。妻子们被认为是为村庄准备宴席的必要条件。如果这些妻子中的任何一个找了其他情人,看来她们通常都是这样做的,酋长对此也无能为力,因为他必须保持自己在大家心目中的良好形象,才能继续担任酋长。
Chiefs found themselves in this situation, Clastres argued, because they weren’t the only ones who were mature and insightful political actors; almost everyone was. Rather than being trapped in some sort of Rousseauian innocence, unable to imagine more complex forms of organization, people were generally more capable than we are of imagining alternative social orders, and therefore had created ‘societies against the state’. They had self-consciously organized in such a way that the forms of arbitrary power and domination we associate with ‘advanced political systems’ could never possibly emerge.
克拉斯特尔认为,酋长们发现自己处于这种情况,因为,他们并不是唯一成熟和有洞察力的政治行为者;几乎所有人都是。人们不是被困在某种卢梭式的纯真中,无法想象更复杂的组织形式,而是通常比我们更有能力想象其他社会秩序,因此创造了 “反国家的社会”。他们自觉地组织起来,使我们与 “先进政治制度” 相关联的任意权力和统治的形式永远不可能出现。
Clastres’s argument was, as one might imagine, highly controversial. Some of the criticism directed at him was entirely justified (he had, for example, an enormous blind spot when it came to gender). Still, most of it was based on firm Rousseauian ground, insisting Clastres was ascribing too much imagination to ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ people who, almost by definition, shouldn’t have any. How could one possibly claim, so such criticism went, that stateless societies were self-consciously organizing themselves to prevent the emergence of something they’d never actually experienced?
正如人们可以想象的那样,克拉斯特尔的论点是非常有争议的。针对他的一些批评是完全合理的(例如,他在性别问题上有一个巨大的盲点)。但是,大部分批评还是建立在卢梭的坚实基础上,坚持认为克拉斯特尔把太多的想象力赋予了 “原始” 或 “古老” 的人,而根据定义,他们不应该有任何想象力。这样的批评认为,没有国家的社会是自觉地组织起来,防止出现他们从未实际经历过的东西,这怎么可能呢?
There are a lot of possible ways in which to respond to this objection. Were Amazonians of centuries past, for instance, entirely unaware of the great Andean empires to their west? People used to get around. It’s unlikely they simply had no idea of developments in neighbouring parts of the continent. As we’ll see in Chapter Seven, there is also now a good deal of evidence for the existence of large polities in Amazonia itself, in much earlier times. Perhaps these were the children of rebels who fled or even overthrew such ancient kingdoms. But the most obvious objection is that, if the Amazonians in question were anything like the Nambikwara, they actually did experience relations of arbitrary command during their yearly ‘adventures’ as foraging bands. Yet, oddly, Clastres himself never pointed this out. In fact, he never really talks about seasonality at all.
对这一反对意见有很多可能的回应方式。例如,过去几个世纪的亚马逊人是否完全不知道他们西部的安第斯帝国?人们曾经四处奔波。他们不可能完全不知道该大陆邻近地区的发展。正如我们将在第七章看到的那样,现在也有大量证据表明,在更早的时代,亚马逊地区本身就存在大型政体。也许这些是逃离或甚至推翻这些古代王国的叛乱者的孩子。但最明显的反对意见是,如果有关的亚马逊人与南比克瓦拉人一样,他们在每年的 “冒险” 中确实经历过任意指挥的关系,作为觅食的队伍。然而,奇怪的是,克拉斯特尔本人从未指出这一点。事实上,他根本就没有真正谈论过季节性。
This is a curious omission. It’s also an important one because, by leaving it out, Clastres really put the final nail in the coffin of that earlier tradition running from Marcel Mauss through to Robert Lowie; a tradition which treated ‘primitive’ societies as inherently flexible, and typically characterized by multiple forms of organization. Now, both the neo-evolutionists who saw ‘primitive’ folk as Rousseauian naïfs and the radicals who insisted they were self-conscious egalitarians equally took it for granted they were stuck in a single, very simple mode of social existence.
这是一个奇怪的遗漏。这也是一个重要的问题,因为通过遗漏它,克拉斯特尔真正把最后的钉子钉在了从马塞尔·莫斯到罗伯特·洛维的那个早期传统的棺材上;这个传统把 “原始” 社会视为内在的灵活性,并以多种形式的组织为典型特征。现在,无论是将 “原始” 民俗视为卢梭式的天真者的新进化论者,还是坚持他们是自觉的平等主义者的激进派,都同样认为他们被困在一个单一的、非常简单的社会存在模式中是理所当然的。
In Clastres’s case it’s all the more surprising, because in his original statement on the powerlessness of Indian chiefs, published in 1962, he is quite candid in admitting he pinched almost his entire argument from Lowie. Fourteen years earlier, Lowie had argued that most indigenous American societies, from Montreal to Tierra del Fuego, were effectively anarchists.50 His argument that the ‘typical Indian chief is not a lawgiver, executive, or judge, but a pacifier, a benefactor of the poor, and a prolix Polonius’ (that is, the actual functions of chiefly office are to (1) mediate quarrels, (2) provide for the needy, and (3) to entertain with beautiful speeches) is precisely echoed, point by point, in Clastres’s account. So is Lowie’s conclusion that, since the chiefly office is effectively designed so it can never be turned into a means of compulsion, the only way state-like authority could possibly have emerged was from religious visionaries of one sort or another.
在克拉斯特尔的案例中,这更令人惊讶,因为在他 1962 年发表的关于印第安酋长无能为力的原始声明中,他很坦率地承认,他的整个论点几乎都是从洛维那里偷来的。14 年前,洛维认为,从蒙特利尔到火地岛,大多数美洲原住民社会实际上是无政府主义者。50他认为 “典型的印第安酋长不是法律的制定者、执行者或法官,而是一个安抚者、穷人的施舍者和一个冗长的波洛涅斯”(也就是说,酋长职位的实际功能是 1. 调解争吵,2. 为穷人提供食物,以及 3. 用美丽的演讲来娱乐),这一点在克拉斯特里的叙述中得到了确切的回应。洛伊的结论也是如此,既然酋长职位被有效地设计为永远不能变成一种强制手段,那么类似于国家的权威出现的唯一途径就是来自于这样或那样的宗教幻想家。
Recall, though, that Lowie’s original piece included one additional section, on the ‘evolutionary germs’ of top-down authority, which describes the seasonal ‘police’ and ‘soldiers’ of the Plains societies in detail. Clastres simply left it out. Why?
不过,回顾一下,洛维的原作包括一个额外的部分,关于自上而下权威的 “进化胚胎”,其中详细描述了平原社会的季节性 “警察” 和 “士兵”。克拉斯特尔只是把它排除在外。为什么?
The answer is probably a simple one: seasonality was confusing. In fact, it’s kind of a wild card. The societies of the Great Plains created structures of coercive authority that lasted throughout the entire season of hunting and the rituals that followed, dissolving when they dispersed into smaller groups. But those of central Brazil dispersed into foraging bands as a way of asserting a political authority that was ineffectual in village settings. Among the Inuit, fathers ruled in the summertime; but in winter gatherings patriarchal authority and even norms of sexual propriety were challenged, subverted or simply melted away. The Kwakiutl were hierarchical at both times of year, but nonetheless maintained different forms of hierarchy, giving effective police powers to performers in the Midwinter Ceremonial (the ‘bear dancers’ and ‘fool dancers’) that could be exercised only during the actual performance of the ritual. At other times, aristocrats commanded great wealth but couldn’t give their followers direct orders. Many Central African forager societies are egalitarian all year round, but appear to alternate monthly between a ritual order dominated by men and another dominated by women.51
答案可能很简单:季节性令人困惑。事实上,它是一种通病。大平原的社会建立了强制性的权威结构,这种结构持续了整个狩猎季节和随后的仪式,当他们分散到较小的群体中时就会解散。但巴西中部的人则分散成觅食队,以此来维护在村庄环境中无效的政治权威。在因纽特人中,父亲在夏季统治;但在冬季的聚会中,父权甚至性行为规范都受到挑战,被颠覆或干脆融化了。Kwakiutl 人在一年中的这两个时间段都有等级制度,但仍然保持着不同形式的等级制度,将有效的警察权力赋予中冬仪式的表演者(“熊舞者” 和 “傻瓜舞者”),这些权力只能在实际表演仪式时行使。在其他时候,贵族们指挥着巨大的财富,但不能直接向他们的追随者下达命令。许多中非觅食者社会全年都是平等的,但似乎每月都会在由男性主导的仪式秩序和由女性主导的仪式秩序之间交替进行。51
In other words, there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration, and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities. What all this confirms is that searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ really is asking the wrong question.
换句话说,不存在单一的模式。唯一一致的现象是改变的事实本身,以及随之而来的对不同社会可能性的认识。所有这些都证实了,寻找 “社会不平等的起源” 确实是在问一个错误的问题。
If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?
如果人类在我们的大部分历史中,一直在不同的社会安排之间来回流动,定期组装和拆除等级制度,也许真正的问题应该是 “我们是如何陷进去的?” 我们是如何在一个单一的模式中结束的?我们是如何失去曾经是我们这个物种的典型的政治自我意识的?我们怎么会把显赫和屈从不是作为暂时的权宜之计,甚至不是作为某种盛大的季节性戏剧的盛况,而是作为人类条件中不可避免的元素?如果我们一开始只是在玩游戏,那么在什么时候我们忘记了我们在玩游戏?
We’ll be tackling such questions in the chapters to come. For the moment, the main thing to stress is that this flexibility, and potential for political self-consciousness, was never entirely lost. Mauss pointed out much the same thing. Seasonality is still with us – even if it is a pale, contracted shadow of its former self. In the Christian world, for instance, there is still the midwinter ‘holiday season’ in which values and forms of organization do, to a limited degree, reverse themselves: the same media and advertisers who for most of the year peddle rabid consumerist individualism suddenly start announcing that social relations are what’s really important, and that to give is better than to receive. (And in enlightened countries like Mauss’s France, there’s also the summer grandes vacances in which everybody downs tools for a month and flees the cities.)
我们将在接下来的章节中处理这些问题。目前,主要要强调的是,这种灵活性和政治自我意识的潜力从未完全丧失。毛斯也指出了同样的问题。季节性仍然与我们同在 —— 即使它是其以前的苍白、收缩的阴影。例如,在基督教世界里,仍然有冬季中的 “节日”,在这个季节里,价值观和组织形式确实在有限的程度上发生了逆转:同样的媒体和广告商在一年的大部分时间里都在兜售狂热的消费主义个人主义,突然开始宣布,社会关系才是真正重要的,给予比接受更好。(在像莫斯的法国这样开明的国家,也有夏季的大假期,每个人都放下工具,逃离城市一个月。)
There is a direct historical connection here. We’ve already seen how, among societies like the Inuit or Kwakiutl, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers (though often, peculiarly, these ritual police doubled as clowns).52 In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety, as in the Inuit midwinter orgies. This dichotomy can still be observed in festive life almost everywhere. In the European Middle Ages, to take a familiar example, saints’ days alternated between solemn pageants where all the elaborate ranks and hierarchies of feudal life were made manifest (much as they still are in, say, a college graduation ceremony, when we temporarily revert to medieval garb), and crazy carnivals in which everyone played at ‘turning the world upside down’. In carnival, women might rule over men, children be put in charge of government, servants could demand work from their masters, ancestors could return from the dead, ‘carnival kings’ could be crowned and then dethroned, giant monuments like wicker dragons built and set on fire, or all formal ranks might even disintegrate into one or other form of Bacchanalian chaos.53
这里有一个直接的历史联系。我们已经看到,在因纽特人或 Kwakiutl 等社会中,季节性聚会的时间也是仪式的季节,几乎完全交给了舞蹈、仪式和戏剧。有时,这些活动可能涉及建立临时国王,甚至是具有真正强制力的仪式警察(不过,奇怪的是,这些仪式警察往往兼任小丑)。52在其他情况下,他们涉及解散等级和礼节的规范,如因纽特人的冬季狂欢。这种二分法在几乎所有的节日生活中都可以看到。在欧洲中世纪,举一个大家都熟悉的例子,圣人节在庄严的庆典和疯狂的狂欢之间交替进行,在庆典中,封建生活中所有精心设计的等级和层次都得到了体现(就像在大学毕业典礼上,当我们暂时恢复到中世纪的服装时,它们依然如此),在狂欢中,每个人都在玩 “颠覆世界” 的游戏。在狂欢节中,女人可以统治男人,孩子可以掌管政府,仆人可以向主人要求工作,祖先可以死而复生,“狂欢节国王” 可以加冕,然后被废黜,建造像柳条龙一样的巨大纪念碑并放火,或者所有正式的等级甚至可能瓦解成一种或其他形式的狂欢混乱。53
Just as with seasonality, there’s no consistent pattern. Ritual occasions can either be much more stiff and formal, or much more wild and playful, than ordinary life. Alternatively, like funerals and wakes, they can slip back and forth between the two. The same seems to be true of festive life almost everywhere, whether it’s Peru, Benin or China. This is why anthropologists often have such trouble defining what a ‘ritual’ even is. If you start from the solemn ones, ritual is a matter of etiquette, propriety: High Church ritual, for example, is really just a very elaborate version of table manners. Some have gone so far as to argue that what we call ‘social structure’ only really exists during rituals: think here of families that only exist as a physical group during marriages and funerals, during which times questions of rank and priority have to be worked out by who sits at which table, who speaks first, who gets the topmost cut of the hump of a sacrificed water buffalo, or the first slice of wedding cake.
就像季节性一样,没有一致的模式。仪式场合可以比普通生活更加僵硬和正式,也可以更加狂野和俏皮。或者,像葬礼和守灵一样,它们可以在这两者之间来回滑动。无论是秘鲁、贝宁还是中国,几乎所有地方的节日生活都是这样的。这就是为什么人类学家在定义什么是 “仪式” 时经常遇到麻烦。如果你从庄严的开始,仪式是一个礼仪、礼节的问题:例如,高级教堂的仪式,实际上只是一个非常精致的餐桌礼仪的版本。有些人甚至认为,我们所谓的 “社会结构” 只有在仪式期间才真正存在:想想那些只在结婚和葬礼期间作为一个物理群体存在的家庭,在这些时候,等级和优先权问题必须通过谁坐在哪张桌子上、谁先说话、谁能得到牺牲的水牛的驼峰的最顶端,或第一片婚礼蛋糕来解决。
But sometimes festivals are moments where entirely different social structures take over, such as the ‘youth abbeys’ that seem to have existed across medieval Europe, with their Boy Bishops, May Queens, Lords of Misrule, Abbots of Unreason and Princes of Sots, who during the Christmas, Mayday or carnival season temporarily took over many of the functions of government and enacted a bawdy parody of government’s everyday forms. So there’s another school of thought which says that rituals are really exactly the opposite. The really powerful ritual moments are those of collective chaos, effervescence, liminality or creative play, out of which new social forms can come into the world.54
但有时节日是完全不同的社会结构接管的时刻,例如似乎存在于整个中世纪欧洲的 “青年修道院”,他们有男孩主教、五月女王、不守规矩的领主、不讲道理的修道院院长和笨蛋王子,他们在圣诞节、五月天或狂欢节期间暂时接管了政府的许多职能,颁布了对政府日常形式的粗俗模仿。因此,还有一个学派说,仪式实际上正好相反。真正强大的仪式时刻是那些集体混乱、涌动、 边缘性或创造性游戏的时刻,从这些时刻中,新的社会形式可以进入世界。54
There is also a centuries-long, and frankly not very enlightening, debate over whether the most apparently subversive popular festivals were really as subversive as they seem; or if they are really conservative, allowing common folk a chance to blow off a little steam and give vent to their baser instincts before returning to everyday habits of obedience.55 It strikes us that all this rather misses the point.
还有一个长达几个世纪的争论,坦率地说,这个争论是关于最明显的颠覆性的大众节日是否真的像它们看起来那样颠覆;或者它们是否真的是保守的,让普通人有机会吹掉一点蒸汽,发泄他们更基本的本能,然后再回到日常的服从习惯中。55我们觉得,这一切反而忽略了重点。
What’s really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. In the popular Babylonian story of Semiramis, the eponymous servant girl convinces the Assyrian king to let her be ‘Queen for a Day’ during some annual festival, promptly has him arrested, declares herself empress and leads her new armies to conquer the world. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at ‘turning the world upside’ would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way.
这种节日真正重要的是,它们保持了政治自我意识的古老火花。它们允许人们想象其他安排是可行的,甚至对整个社会来说也是如此,因为人们总是有可能幻想狂欢节爆裂并成为新的现实。在流行的巴比伦故事《塞米拉米斯》中,同名的女仆说服亚述国王在某个年度节日里让她做 “一天的女王”,并迅速将他逮捕,宣布自己为皇后,带领她的新军队征服世界。五一节被选为国际工人节日的日期,主要是因为历史上有许多英国农民起义是在这个暴乱的节日开始的。玩 “颠覆世界” 游戏的村民会定期决定他们实际上更喜欢颠覆世界,并采取措施保持这种状态。
Medieval peasants often found it much easier than medieval intellectuals to imagine a society of equals. Now, perhaps, we begin to understand why. Seasonal festivals may be a pale echo of older patterns of seasonal variation – but, for the last few thousand years of human history at least, they appear to have played much the same role in fostering political self-consciousness, and as laboratories of social possibility. The first kings may well have been play kings. Then they became real kings. Now most (but not all) existing kings have been reduced once again to play kings – as least insofar as they mainly perform ceremonial functions and no longer wield real power. But even if all monarchies, including ceremonial monarchies, were to disappear, some people would still play at being kings.
中世纪的农民往往发现比中世纪的知识分子更容易想象一个平等的社会。现在,也许我们开始理解了原因。季节性节日可能是古老的季节变化模式的苍白回声 —— 但是,至少在人类历史的最后几千年里,它们在培养政治自我意识和作为社会可能性的实验室方面似乎发挥了大致相同的作用。最初的国王很可能是游戏中的国王。然后他们成为真正的国王。现在,大多数(但不是全部)现有的国王已经再次沦为游戏中的国王 —— 至少在他们主要履行仪式性职能而不再拥有真正的权力方面。但是,即使所有的君主制,包括礼仪性的君主制都消失了,有些人仍然会扮演国王的角色。
Even in the European Middle Ages, in places where monarchy was unquestioned as a mode of government, ‘Abbots of Unreason’, Yuletide Kings and the like tended to be chosen either by election or by sortition (lottery), the very forms of collective decision-making that resurfaced, apparently out of nowhere, in the Enlightenment. (What’s more, such figures tended to exercise power much in the manner of indigenous American chiefs: either limited to very circumscribed contexts, like the war chiefs who could give orders only during military expeditions; or like village chiefs who were arrayed with formal honours but couldn’t tell anybody what to do.) For a great many societies, the festive year could be read as a veritable encyclopaedia of possible political forms.
即使在欧洲中世纪,在君主制作为一种政府模式不受质疑的地方,“不讲理的修道院院长”、节日国王和类似人物往往是通过选举或抽签(彩票)选出的,这些集体决策形式在启蒙运动中显然是突然出现的。(更重要的是,这些人物往往以美洲本土酋长的方式行使权力:要么局限于非常有限的范围,如战争酋长,只能在军事远征期间发号施令;要么像村长,有正式的荣誉,但不能告诉任何人该做什么。)对于许多社会来说,节日年可以被解读为一部名副其实的可能政治形式的百科全书。
Let us end this chapter where we began it. For far too long we have been generating myths. As a result, we’ve been mostly asking the wrong questions: are festive rituals expressions of authority, or vehicles for social creativity? Are they reactionary or progressive? Were our earliest ancestors simple and egalitarian, or complex and stratified? Is human nature innocent or corrupt? Are we, as a species, inherently co-operative or competitive, kind or selfish, good or evil?
让我们在开始的地方结束这一章。长久以来,我们一直在制造神话。结果是,我们大多问错了问题:节日仪式是权威的表达,还是社会创造力的载体?它们是反动的还是进步的?我们最早的祖先是简单而平等的,还是复杂而分层的?人类的本性是无辜的还是堕落的?作为一个物种,我们本质上是合作还是竞争,是善良还是自私,是善还是恶?
Perhaps all these questions blind us to what really makes us human in the first place, which is our capacity – as moral and social beings – to negotiate between such alternatives. As we’ve already observed, it makes no sense to ask any such questions of a fish or a hedgehog. Animals already exist in a state ‘beyond good and evil’, the very one that Nietzsche dreamed humans might also aspire to. Perhaps we are doomed always to be arguing about such things. But certainly, it is more interesting to start asking other questions as well. If nothing else, surely the time has come to stop the swinging pendulum that has fixated generations of philosophers, historians and social scientists, leading their gaze from Hobbes to Rousseau, from Rousseau to Hobbes and back again. We do not have to choose any more between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story. Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge (as Lévi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them – at least the most reflexive among them – just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature. They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.
也许所有这些问题都让我们忽略了真正使我们成为人类的原因,那就是我们作为道德人和社会人的能力 —— 在这些选择之间进行谈判。正如我们已经观察到的,对一条鱼或一只刺猬提出任何这样的问题都是没有意义的。动物已经存在于一种 “超越善恶” 的状态中,这正是尼采所梦想的人类可能向往的状态。也许我们注定要一直为这些事情争论不休。但当然,开始问其他问题也是更有趣的。如果不出意外的话,现在肯定是时候停止摆动的钟摆了,这种钟摆让几代的哲学家、历史学家和社会科学家都固定下来,把他们的目光从霍布斯引向卢梭,从卢梭引向霍布斯,然后再引向卢梭。我们不必再在人类故事的平等主义或等级制度的起点之间做出选择。让我们告别 “人类的童年”,承认(正如列维·斯特劳斯所坚持的)我们的早期祖先不仅是我们认知上的平等者,也是我们智力上的同行。很可能的是,他们和我们一样在努力解决社会秩序和创造力的悖论;而且对它们的理解 —— 至少是他们中最有反思精神的人 —— 也一样多,这,也意味着一样少。他们也许对某些事情的认识更多,对另一些事情的认识更少。他们既不是无知的野蛮人,也不是大自然的聪明儿女。正如海伦娜·瓦莱罗在谈到亚诺玛米人时说的那样,他们只是人,和我们一样;同样有感知力,同样困惑。
Be this as it may, it’s becoming increasing clear that the earliest known evidence of human social life resembles a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. If there is a riddle here it’s this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens – supposedly the wisest of apes – allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? Was this really a consequence of adopting agriculture? Of settling down in permanent villages and, later, towns? Should we be looking for a moment in time like the one Rousseau envisaged, when somebody first enclosed a tract of land, declaring: ‘This is mine and always will be!’ Or is that another fool’s errand?
尽管如此,越来越清楚的是,人类社会生活最早的证据类似于政治形式的狂欢节游行,远比进化论的单调抽象要好。如果这里有一个谜题的话,那就是:为什么在构建和拆解了几千年的等级制度之后,智人 —— 据说是最聪明的猿人 —— 允许永久性的、难以解决的不平等制度扎根?这真的是采用农业的结果吗?在永久的村庄和后来的城镇中定居下来?我们是否应该寻找一个像卢梭所设想的那样的时刻,当有人第一次圈出一片土地,宣布:“这是我的,永远都是!”。还是说这又是一个愚蠢的任务?
These are the questions to which we now turn.
这些是我们现在要讨论的问题。
(Not necessarily in that order)
Changing your social identity with the changing seasons might sound like a wonderful idea, but it’s not something anyone reading this book is ever likely to experience first-hand. Yet until very recently, the European continent was still littered with folk practices that echoed these ancient rhythmic oscillations of social structure. Folklorists have long puzzled over all the little brigades of people disguised as plants and animals, the Straw Bears and Green Men, who marched dutifully out each spring and autumn into village squares, everywhere from rural England to the Rhodope Mountains of southern Bulgaria: were they genuine traces of ancient practices, or recent revivals and reinventions? Or revivals of traces? Or traces of revivals? It’s often impossible to tell.
随着季节的变化而改变你的社会身份,这听起来是一个美妙的想法,但这并不是读这本书的人可能亲身经历的事情。然而,直到最近,欧洲大陆仍然充斥着呼应这些古老的社会结构节奏摆动的民俗做法。长期以来,民俗学家们一直对那些伪装成植物和动物的族群,即草熊和绿人感到困惑,他们每年春天和秋天都会尽职尽责地走到村庄的广场上,从英格兰的乡村到保加利亚南部的罗多普山,到处都是如此:他们是古代习俗的真正痕迹,还是最近的复兴和再创造?或者痕迹的复兴?还是复兴的痕迹?这往往是无法判断的。
Most of these rituals have been gradually brushed aside as pagan superstition or repackaged as tourist attractions (or both). For the most part, all we’re left with as an alternative to our mundane lives are our ‘national holidays’: frantic periods of over-consumption, crammed in the gaps between work, in which we entertain solemn injunctions that consumption isn’t really what matters about life. As we’ve seen, our remote forager ancestors were much bolder experimenters in social form, breaking apart and reassembling their societies at different scales, often in radically different forms, with different value systems, from one time of year to the next. The festive calendars of the great agrarian civilizations of Eurasia, Africa and the Americas turn out to be mere distant echoes of that world and the political freedoms it entailed.
这些仪式中的大多数已经逐渐被当作异教迷信抛在一边,或者被重新包装成旅游景点(或者两者都是)。在大多数情况下,我们只剩下 “国家假日” 作为我们世俗生活的替代品:疯狂的过度消费时期,挤在工作的间隙,我们在其中接受庄严的禁令,消费并不是生活的真正意义。正如我们所看到的,我们偏远地区的觅食者祖先在社会形式方面是更大胆的实验者,他们在不同的规模上拆散和重新组合他们的社会,往往以完全不同的形式,以不同的价值体系,从一年中的一个时间到另一个时间。欧亚、非洲和美洲的伟大农业文明的节日日历,原来只是那个世界和它所带来的政治自由的遥远的回声而已。
Still, we could never have figured that out by material evidence alone. If all we had to go on were Palaeolithic ‘mammoth buildings’ on the Russian steppe, or the princely burials of the Ligurian Ice Age and their associated physical remains, scholars would no doubt be left scratching their heads until the sun explodes. Human beings may be (indeed, we’ve argued they are) fundamentally imaginative creatures, but no one is that imaginative. You would have to be either extremely naive or extremely arrogant to think anybody could simply logic such matters out. (And even if someone did manage to come up with anything like Nuer prophets, Kwakiutl clown-police or Inuit seasonal wife-swapping orgies, simply through logical extrapolation they’d probably be instantly written off as kooks.)
尽管如此,我们永远不可能仅靠物质证据来弄清楚。如果我们只能依靠俄罗斯草原上的旧石器时代的 “猛犸象建筑”,或者利古里亚冰河时代的王子墓葬,以及与之相关的物理遗迹,学者们无疑会抓耳挠腮直到太阳爆炸。人类可能是(事实上,我们认为他们是)从根本上具有想象力的生物,但没有人是那么有想象力的。你必须非常天真或非常傲慢地认为任何人都可以简单地把这种事情逻辑化。(即使有人能想出像努埃尔人的预言家、Kwakiutl 人的小丑警察或因纽特人的季节性换妻狂欢,仅仅通过逻辑推理,他们也可能立即被写成怪人。)
This is precisely why the ethnographic record is so important. The Nuer and Inuit should never have been seen as ‘windows on to our ancestral past’. They are creations of the modern age just the same as we are – but they do show us possibilities we never would have thought of and prove that people are actually capable of enacting such possibilities, even building whole social systems and value systems around them. In short, they remind us that human beings are far more interesting than (other) human beings are sometimes inclined to imagine.
这正是人种学记录如此重要的原因。努尔人和因纽特人不应该被看作是 “我们祖先的过去的窗口”。他们和我们一样都是现代的创造物 —— 但他们确实向我们展示了我们从未想过的可能性,并证明人们实际上有能力实现这种可能性,甚至围绕它们建立整个社会系统和价值体系。简而言之,它们提醒我们,人类远比(其他)人类有时倾向于想象的更有趣。
In this chapter, we’ll do two things. First, we’ll continue our story forwards in time from the Palaeolithic, looking at some of the extraordinary cultural arrangements that emerged across the world before our ancestors turned their hands to farming. Second, we’ll start answering the question we posed in the last chapter: how did we get stuck? How did some human societies begin to move away from the flexible, shifting arrangements that appear to have characterized our earliest ancestors, in such a way that certain individuals or groups were able to claim permanent power over others: men over women; elders over youth; and eventually, priestly castes, warrior aristocracies and rulers who actually ruled?
在本章中,我们将做两件事。首先,我们将从旧石器时代继续我们的故事,看看在我们的祖先转而从事农业生产之前,世界各地出现的一些非凡的文化安排。其次,我们将开始回答我们在上一章提出的问题:我们是如何陷入困境的?一些人类社会是如何开始脱离灵活多变的安排的,这些安排似乎是我们最早的祖先的特征,以至于某些个人或群体能够要求对其他人拥有永久的权力:男人对女人;长者对年轻人;以及最终,祭司种姓、战士贵族和实际统治者?
In order for these things to become possible, a number of other factors first had to fall into place. One is the very existence of what we would intuitively recognize as discrete ‘societies’ to begin with. It may not even make sense to describe the mammoth hunters of Upper Palaeolithic Europe as being organized into separate, bounded societies, in the way we talk about the nations of Europe, or for that matter First Nations of Canada like the Mohawk, Wendat or Montagnais-Naskapi.
为了使这些事情成为可能,一些其他因素首先必须到位。一个是我们直觉地认识到的离散的 “社会” 的存在。把欧洲旧石器时代上部的猛犸象猎人描述成独立的、有界限的社会,就像我们谈论欧洲的国家,或加拿大的第一民族,如莫霍克族、温达族或蒙塔格奈斯·纳斯卡皮族那样,可能都没有意义。
Of course, we know almost nothing about the languages people were speaking in the Upper Palaeolithic, their myths, initiation rituals, or conceptions of the soul; but we do know that, from the Swiss Alps to Outer Mongolia, they were often using remarkably similar tools,1 playing remarkably similar musical instruments, carving similar female figurines, wearing similar ornaments and conducting similar funeral rites. What’s more, there is reason to believe that at certain points in their lives, individual men and women often travelled very long distances.2 Surprisingly, current studies of hunter-gatherers suggest that this is almost exactly what one should expect.
当然,我们对上旧石器时代人们的语言、他们的神话、入会仪式或灵魂概念几乎一无所知;但我们知道,从瑞士阿尔卑斯山到外蒙古,他们经常使用极为相似的工具。1但我们知道,从瑞士阿尔卑斯山到外蒙古,他们经常使用非常相似的工具,演奏非常相似的乐器,雕刻相似的女性雕像,佩戴相似的装饰品,举行相似的丧葬礼节。更重要的是,我们有理由相信,在他们生活的某些阶段,个别的男人和女人经常走很远的路。2令人惊讶的是,目前对狩猎采集者的研究表明,这几乎正是人们应该期待的。
Research among groups such as the East African Hadza or Australian Martu shows that while forager societies today may be numerically small, their composition is remarkably cosmopolitan. When forager bands gather into larger residential groups these are not, in any sense, made up of a tight-knit unit of closely related kin; in fact, primarily biological relations constitute on average a mere 10 per cent of total membership. Most members are drawn from a much wider pool of individuals, many from quite far away, who may not even speak the same first languages.3 This is true even for contemporary groups that are effectively encapsulated in restricted territories, surrounded by farmers and pastoralists.
对东非哈德萨人或澳大利亚马尔图人等群体的研究表明,虽然今天的觅食者社会在数量上可能很小,但他们的构成却非常具有世界性。当觅食者聚集成较大的居住群体时,这些群体在任何意义上都不是由密切相关的亲属组成的紧密单位;事实上,主要的生物关系平均只占成员总数的 10%。大多数成员来自更广泛的人群,许多人来自很远的地方,他们甚至可能不说同样的第一语言。3即使是那些被农民和牧民包围在有限领土内的当代群体也是如此。
In earlier centuries, forms of regional organization might extend thousands of miles. Aboriginal Australians, for instance, could travel halfway across the continent, moving among people who spoke entirely different languages, and still find camps divided into the same kinds of totemic moieties that existed at home. What this means is that half the residents owed them hospitality, but had to be treated as ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ (so sexual relations were strictly prohibited); while another half were both potential enemies and marriage partners. Similarly, a North American 500 years ago could travel from the shores of the Great Lakes to the Louisiana bayous and still find settlements – speaking languages entirely unrelated to their own – with members of their own Bear, Elk or Beaver clans who were obliged to host and feed them.4
在早期的几个世纪里,区域组织的形式可能延伸到数千英里。例如,澳大利亚原住民可以穿越半个大陆,在讲完全不同语言的人中间移动,并且仍然发现营地被分为与国内相同的图腾部落。这意味着一半的居民欠他们的款待,但必须作为 “兄弟” 和 “姐妹” 对待(因此严禁发生性关系);而另一半居民既是潜在的敌人,也是婚姻伙伴。同样,500 年前的北美人可以从大湖岸边走到路易斯安那州的河口,仍然可以找到定居点 —— 说的是与他们自己的语言完全无关的语言 —— 有他们自己的熊族、麋鹿族或海狸族的成员,他们有义务接待和喂养他们。4
It’s difficult enough to reconstruct how these forms of long-distance organization operated just a few centuries ago, before they were destroyed by the coming of European settlers. So we can really only guess how analogous systems might have worked some 40,000 years ago. But the striking material uniformities observed by archaeologists across very long distances attest to the existence of such systems. ‘Society’, insofar as we can comprehend it at that time, spanned continents.
要重建这些远距离组织形式在几个世纪前是如何运作的,在它们被欧洲定居者的到来破坏之前,这已经很困难了。所以我们真的只能猜测类似的系统在大约 4 万年前是如何运作的。但是,考古学家在很远的地方观察到的惊人的物质统一性证明了这种系统的存在。就我们当时所能理解的 “社会” 而言,它跨越了各大洲。
Much of this seems counter-intuitive. We are used to assuming that advances in technology are continually making the world a smaller place. In a purely physical sense, of course, this is true: the domestication of the horse, and gradual improvements in seafaring, to take just two examples, certainly made it much easier for people to move around. But at the same time, increases in the sheer number of human beings seem to have pulled in the opposite direction, ensuring that, for much of human history, ever-diminishing proportions of people actually travelled – at least, over long distances or very far from home. If we survey what happens over time, the scale on which social relations operate doesn’t get bigger and bigger; it actually gets smaller and smaller.
这其中的大部分似乎是违反直觉的。我们习惯于假设技术的进步正在不断地使世界变得更小。当然,从纯粹的物理意义上来说,这是真的:马的驯化和航海技术的逐步改进,仅举两个例子,肯定使人们的移动变得更加容易。但与此同时,人类数量的增加似乎起到了相反的作用,确保了在人类历史的大部分时间里,实际旅行的人的比例不断减少 —— 至少是在长距离或离家很远的地方。如果我们调查随着时间的推移所发生的事情,社会关系运作的规模并没有变得越来越大;它实际上变得越来越小。
A cosmopolitan Upper Palaeolithic is followed by a complicated period of several thousand years, beginning around 12,000 BC, in which it first becomes possible to trace the outlines of separate ‘cultures’ based on more than just stone tools. Some foragers, after this time, continued following large mammal herds; others settled on the coast and became fisherfolk, or gathered acorns in forests. Prehistorians use the term ‘Mesolithic’ for these postglacial populations. Across large parts of Africa and East Asia, their technological innovations – including pottery, ‘micro-lithic’ tool kits and stone grinding tools – signal new ways of preparing and eating wild grains, roots and other vegetables: chopping, slicing, grating, grinding, soaking, draining, boiling, and also ways of storing, smoking and otherwise preserving meats, plant foods and fish.5
在世界性的上旧石器时代之后,是一个复杂的时期,大约从公元前 12000 年开始,在这个时期,人们第一次有可能追踪到独立的 “文化” 的轮廓,而不仅仅是基于石头工具。在这一时期之后,一些觅食者继续追随大型哺乳动物群;另一些则定居在海岸,成为渔民,或在森林中采集橡子。史前学家用 “中石器时代” 一词来形容这些冰期后的人群。在非洲和东亚的大部分地区,他们的技术创新 —— 包括陶器、“微型石器” 工具包和石磨工具 —— 标志着准备和食用野生谷物、根茎和其他蔬菜的新方法:切碎、切片、磨碎、浸泡、沥干、煮沸,以及储存、熏制和以其他方式保存肉类、植物食品和鱼类的方法。5
Before long these had spread everywhere, and paved the way for the creation of what we’d now call cuisine: the kind of soups, porridges, stews, broths and fermented beverages we’re familiar with today. But cuisines are also, almost everywhere, markers of difference. People who wake up to fish stews every morning tend to see themselves as a different sort of people from those who breakfast on a porridge of berries and wild oats. Such distinctions were no doubt echoed by parallel developments that are much more difficult to reconstruct: different tastes in clothing, dancing, drugs, hairstyles, courtship rituals; different forms of kinship organization and styles of formal rhetoric. The ‘culture areas’ of these Mesolithic foragers were still extremely large. True, the Neolithic versions that soon developed alongside them – associated with the first farming populations – were typically smaller; but for the most part they still spread out over territories considerably larger than most modern nation states.
不久之后,这些东西就传遍了各地,并为我们现在所说的美食的产生铺平了道路:我们今天所熟悉的那种汤、粥、 炖菜、肉汤和发酵饮料。但是,几乎在任何地方,美食也是差异的标志。每天早上在炖鱼中醒来的人,往往认为自己是与那些以浆果和野燕麦粥为早餐的人不同的一类人。这种区别无疑是由更难重建的平行发展所呼应的:对服装、舞蹈、毒品、发型、求爱仪式的不同品味;不同形式的亲属组织和正式修辞的风格。这些中石器时代觅食者的 “文化区” 仍然非常大。诚然,很快与他们一起发展起来的新石器时代版本 —— 与第一批农业人口有关 —— 通常较小;但在大多数情况下,他们仍然分布在比大多数现代民族国家大得多的地区。
Only much later do we begin to encounter the kind of situation familiar to anthropologists of Amazonia or Papua New Guinea, where a single river valley might contain speakers of half a dozen different languages, with entirely distinct economic systems or cosmological beliefs. Sometimes, of course, this tendency towards micro-differentiation was reversed – as with the spread of imperial languages like English or Han Chinese. But the overall direction of history – at least until very recently – would seem to be the very opposite of globalization. It is one of increasingly local allegiances: extraordinary cultural inventiveness, but much of it aimed at finding new ways for people to set themselves off against each other. True, the larger regional networks of hospitality endured in some places.6 Overall, though, what we observe is not so much the world as a whole getting smaller, but most peoples’ social worlds growing more parochial, their lives and passions more likely to be circumscribed by boundaries of culture, class and language.
只有在很久以后,我们才开始遇到亚马逊或巴布亚新几内亚的人类学家所熟悉的那种情况,在那里,一个河谷可能包含有半打不同语言的使用者,有着完全不同的经济体系或宇宙论信仰。当然,有时这种微观差异的趋势会被逆转 —— 如英语或汉族等帝国语言的传播。但历史的总体方向 —— 至少直到最近 —— 似乎与全球化截然相反。这是一个越来越多的地方效忠:非凡的文化创造力,但其中大部分旨在为人们找到新的方法,使他们彼此分离。诚然,较大的区域性接待网络在一些地方仍然存在。6但总的来说,我们看到的不是整个世界变得越来越小,而是大多数人的社会世界变得越来越狭隘,他们的生活和激情更可能被文化、阶级和语言的界限所限制。
We might ask why all this has happened. What are the mechanisms that cause human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbours? This is an important question. We shall be considering it in much more detail in the following chapter.
我们可能会问为什么会发生这一切。是什么机制导致人类花费如此多的精力,试图证明他们与邻居的不同?这是一个重要的问题。我们将在下一章中更详细地考虑这个问题。
For the moment, we simply note that the proliferation of separate social and cultural universes – confined in space and relatively bounded – must have contributed in various ways to the emergence of more durable and intransigent forms of domination. The mixed composition of so many foraging societies clearly indicates that individuals were routinely on the move for a plethora of reasons, including taking the first available exit route if one’s personal freedoms were threatened at home. Cultural porosity is also necessary for the kind of seasonal demographic pulses that made it possible for societies to alternate periodically between different political arrangements, forming massive congregations at one time of year, then dispersing into a multitude of smaller units for the remainder.
目前,我们只是注意到,独立的社会和文化世界的扩散 —— 在空间上的限制和相对的约束 —— 肯定以各种方式促进了更持久和顽固的统治形式的出现。如此多的觅食社会的混合组成清楚地表明,个人经常因各种原因而迁移,包括在家中个人自由受到威胁时采取第一条可用的出口路线。文化的多孔性对于那种季节性的人口脉动也是必要的,这使得社会有可能在不同的政治安排之间定期交替,在一年中的某个时候形成大规模的聚集,然后在其余时间分散成许多较小的单位。
That is one reason why the majestic theatre of Palaeolithic ‘princely’ burials – or even of Stonehenge – never seems to have gone too far beyond theatrics. Simply put, it’s difficult to exercise arbitrary power in, say, January over someone you will be facing on equal terms again come July. The hardening and multiplication of cultural boundaries can only have reduced such possibilities.
这就是为什么旧石器时代的 “王子” 墓葬 —— 甚至巨石阵 —— 的雄伟戏剧似乎从未超越戏剧性的原因之一。简单地说,在一月份对一个你将在七月份再次平等面对的人行使任意的权力是很难的。文化边界的硬化和增殖只能减少这种可能性。
The emergence of local cultural worlds during the Mesolithic made it more likely that a relatively self-contained society might abandon seasonal dispersal and settle into some kind of full-time, top-down, hierarchical arrangement. In our terms, to get stuck. But of course, this in itself hardly explains why any particular society did, in fact, get stuck in such arrangements. We are back to something not entirely different from the ‘origins of social inequality’ problem – but by now, we can at least focus a little more sharply on what the problem really is.
在中石器时代,地方文化世界的出现使得一个相对独立的社会更有可能放弃季节性的分散,而沉淀为某种全职的、自上而下的等级制度安排。用我们的话说,就是卡住了。但当然,这本身很难解释为什么任何特定的社会事实上会陷入这种安排中。我们又回到了与 “社会不平等的起源” 问题并不完全不同的地方 —— 但到现在,我们至少可以更尖锐地关注这个问题到底是什么。
As we have repeatedly observed, ‘inequality’ is a slippery term, so slippery, in fact, that it’s not entirely clear what the term ‘egalitarian society’ should even mean. Usually, it’s defined negatively: as the absence of hierarchies (the belief that certain people or types of people are superior to others), or as the absence of relations of domination or exploitation. This is already quite complex, and the moment we try to define egalitarianism in positive terms everything becomes much more so.
正如我们反复观察到的,“不平等” 是一个滑稽的术语,事实上,滑稽到甚至不完全清楚 “平等主义社会” 这个术语应该意味着什么。通常,它被消极地定义为:没有等级制度(认为某些人或某些类型的人比其他人优越),或者没有统治或剥削关系。这已经很复杂了,而当我们试图从正面定义平等主义的时候,一切都变得更加复杂了。
On the one hand, ‘egalitarianism’ (as opposed to ‘equality’, let alone ‘uniformity’ or ‘homogeneity’) seems to refer to the presence of some kind of ideal. It’s not just that an outside observer would tend to see all members of, say, a Semang hunting party as pretty much interchangeable, like the cannon-fodder minions of some alien overlord in a science fiction movie (this would, in fact, be rather offensive); but rather, that Semang themselves feel they ought to be the same – not in every way, since that would be ridiculous, but in the ways that really matter. It also implies that this ideal is, largely, realized. So, as a first approximation, we can speak of an egalitarian society if (1) most people in a given society feel they really ought to be the same in some specific way, or ways, that are agreed to be particularly important; and (2) that ideal can be said to be largely achieved in practice.
一方面,“平均主义”(相对于 “平等”,更不用说 “统一性” 或 “同质性”)似乎是指存在着某种理想。这不仅仅是指外部观察者倾向于将所有成员,例如塞芒人的狩猎队,看作是几乎可以互换的,就像科幻电影中某个外星霸主的炮灰奴才一样(事实上,这相当令人反感);而是指塞芒人自己觉得他们应该是一样的 —— 不是在所有方面,因为那会很可笑,而是在真正重要的方面。这也意味着,这一理想在很大程度上得到了实现。因此,作为一个初步的近似,我们可以说是一个平等主义的社会,如果(1)在一个特定的社会中,大多数人觉得他们真的应该在某些特定的方式或方式上是相同的,被认为是特别重要的;和(2)这个理想可以说是在实践中基本实现。
Another way to put this might be as follows. If all societies are organized around certain key values (wealth, piety, beauty, freedom, knowledge, warrior prowess), then ‘egalitarian societies’ are those where everyone (or almost everyone) agrees that the paramount values should be, and generally speaking are, distributed equally. If wealth is what’s considered the most important thing in life, then everyone is more or less equally wealthy. If learning is most valued, then everyone has equal access to knowledge. If what’s most important is one’s relationship with the gods, then a society is egalitarian if there are no priests and everyone has equal access to places of worship.
另一种说法可能是这样的。如果所有的社会都是围绕着某些关键价值(财富、虔诚、美、自由、知识、战力)组织起来的,那么 “平等主义社会” 就是那些每个人(或几乎每个人)都同意最重要的价值应该,而且一般来说是平等分配。如果财富被认为是生活中最重要的东西,那么每个人的财富或多或少都是平等的。如果学习是最有价值的,那么每个人都有平等的机会获得知识。如果最重要的是一个人与神的关系,那么如果没有祭司,每个人都有平等的机会进入礼拜场所,那么这个社会就是平等主义的。
You may have noticed an obvious problem here. Different societies sometimes have radically different systems of value, and what might be most important in one – or at least, what everyone insists is most important in one – might have very little to do with what’s important in another. Imagine a society in which everyone is equal before the gods, but 50 per cent of the population are sharecroppers with no property and therefore no legal or political rights. Does it really make sense to call this an ‘egalitarian society’ – even if everyone, including the sharecroppers, insists that it’s really only one’s relation to the gods that is ultimately important?
你可能已经注意到这里有一个明显的问题。不同的社会有时有着截然不同的价值体系,在一个社会中最重要的东西 —— 或者至少是每个人都坚持认为在一个社会中最重要的东西 —— 可能与另一个社会中的重要东西关系不大。想象一下这样一个社会,在上帝面前人人平等,但 50% 的人口是佃农,没有财产,因此没有法律或政治权利。把这称为 “平等主义社会” 真的有意义吗 —— 即使每个人,包括佃农,都坚持认为只有一个人与神的关系才是最终重要的?
There’s only one way out of this dilemma: to create some sort of universal, objective standards by which to measure equality. Since the time of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, this has almost invariably meant focusing on property arrangements. As we’ve seen, it was only at this point, in the mid to late eighteenth century, that European philosophers first came up with the idea of ranking human societies according to their means of subsistence, and therefore that hunter-gatherers should be treated as a distinct variety of human being. As we’ve also seen, this idea is very much still with us. But so is Rousseau’s argument that it was only the invention of agriculture that introduced genuine inequality, since it allowed for the emergence of landed property. This is one of the main reasons people today continue to write as if foragers can be assumed to live in egalitarian bands to begin with – because it’s also assumed that without the productive assets (land, livestock) and stockpiled surpluses (grain, wool, dairy products, etc.) made possible by farming, there was no real material basis for anyone to lord it over anyone else.
摆脱这种困境的办法只有一个:建立某种普遍的、客观的标准,以此来衡量平等。自让·雅克·卢梭和亚当·斯密的时代起,这几乎无一例外地意味着关注财产安排。正如我们所看到的,只是在这一点上,在十八世纪中后期,欧洲哲学家首次提出了根据人类社会的生存手段进行排名的想法,因此,狩猎·采集者应该被视为人类的一个独特品种。正如我们所看到的,这种想法在很大程度上仍在我们身边。但卢梭的论点也是如此,即只有农业的发明才带来了真正的不平等,因为它允许土地财产的出现。这也是今天人们继续写作的主要原因之一,好像可以假设觅食者一开始就生活在平等主义的队伍中 —— 因为人们还假设,如果没有农业所带来的生产性资产(土地、牲畜)和储存的剩余物(谷物、羊毛、乳制品等),就没有真正的物质基础让任何人支配其他人。
Conventional wisdom also tells us that the moment a material surplus does become possible, there will also be full-time craft specialists, warriors and priests laying claim to it, and living off some portions of that surplus (or, in the case of warriors, spending the bulk of their time trying to figure out new ways to steal it from each other); and before long, merchants, lawyers and politicians will inevitably follow. These new elites will, as Rousseau emphasized, band together to protect their assets, so the advent of private property will be followed, inexorably, by the rise of ‘the state’.
传统的智慧还告诉我们,当物质盈余确实成为可能的时候,也会有全职的手工艺专家、战士和牧师对其提出要求,并靠这部分盈余过活(或者,在战士的情况下,他们的大部分时间都在试图找出新的方法从对方那里偷走盈余);不久,商人、律师和政治家将不可避免地跟进。正如卢梭所强调的那样,这些新的精英将联合起来保护他们的资产,因此私有财产的出现将不可避免地伴随着 “国家” 的崛起。
We will scrutinize this conventional wisdom in more detail later. For now, suffice to say that while there is a broad truth here, it is so broad as to have very little explanatory power. For sure, only cereal-farming and grain storage made possible bureaucratic regimes like those of Pharaonic Egypt, the Maurya Empire or Han China. But to say that cereal-farming was responsible for the rise of such states is a little like saying that the development of calculus in medieval Persia is responsible for the invention of the atom bomb. It is true that without calculus atomic weaponry would never have been possible. One might even make a case that the invention of calculus set off a chain of events that made it likely someone, somewhere, would eventually create nuclear weapons. But to assert that Al-Tusi’s work on polynomials in the 1100s caused Hiroshima and Nagasaki is clearly absurd. Similarly, with agriculture. Roughly 6,000 years stand between the appearance of the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of what we are used to calling the first states; and in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything remotely like those states.7
我们将在后面更详细地审视这一传统智慧。现在,我们只需说,虽然这里有一个广泛的真理,但它是如此广泛,以至于没有什么解释力。可以肯定的是,只有谷物种植和谷物储存才有可能形成法老埃及、毛利雅帝国或汉族中国这样的官僚制度。但是说谷物种植是这些国家崛起的原因,有点像说中世纪波斯的微积分发展是原子弹发明的原因。诚然,如果没有微积分,原子武器是不可能出现的。人们甚至可以说,微积分的发明引发了一连串的事件,使某个地方的某个人最终有可能制造出核武器。但断言阿尔·图西在 1100 年代对多项式的研究导致了广岛和长崎的发生,显然是荒谬的。同样,在农业方面也是如此。 从中东出现第一批农民到我们习惯称之为第一批国家的崛起,大约有 6000 年的时间;而在世界许多地方,农业从未导致任何类似于这些国家的出现。7
At this juncture, we need to focus on the very notion of a surplus, and the much broader – almost existential – questions it raises. As philosophers realized long ago, this is a concept that poses fundamental questions about what it means to be human. One of the things that sets us apart from non-human animals is that animals produce only and exactly what they need; humans invariably produce more. We are creatures of excess, and this is what makes us simultaneously the most creative, and most destructive, of all species. Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements.
在这个时候,我们需要关注盈余的概念本身,以及它所提出的更广泛的 —— 几乎是存在性的 —— 问题。正如哲学家们很早就意识到的那样,这个概念提出了关于作为人类意味着什么的根本问题。将我们与非人类动物区分开来的原因之一是,动物只生产它们所需要的东西;而人类总是会生产更多。我们是过剩的生物,这也是使我们同时成为所有物种中最具创造性和最具破坏性的物种的原因。统治阶级只是那些以这样一种方式组织社会的人,他们可以为自己提取大部分的盈余,无论是通过进贡、奴隶制、封建会费还是操纵表面上的自由市场安排。
In the nineteenth century, Marx and many of his fellow radicals did imagine that it was possible to administer such a surplus collectively, in an equitable fashion (this is what he envisioned as being the norm under ‘primitive communism’, and what he thought could once again be possible in the revolutionary future), but contemporary thinkers tend to be more sceptical. In fact, the dominant view among anthropologists nowadays is that the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all.
在 19 世纪,马克思和他的许多激进主义同伴确实想象过,有可能以公平的方式集体管理这种剩余(这是他设想的 “原始共产主义” 下的规范,也是他认为在革命的未来可能再次出现的情况),但当代思想家往往更加怀疑。事实上,现在人类学家的主流观点是,维持一个真正平等的社会的唯一方法是消除积累任何形式的剩余的可能性。
The greatest modern authority on hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is, by general consent, the British anthropologist James Woodburn. In the post-war decades Woodburn conducted research among the Hadza, a forager society of Tanzania. He also drew parallels between them and the San Bushmen and Mbuti Pygmies, as well as a number of other small-scale nomadic forager societies outside Africa, such as the Pandaram of south India or Batek of Malaysia.8 Such societies are, Woodburn suggests, the only genuinely egalitarian societies we know of, since they are the only ones that extend equality to gender relations and, as much as is practicable, to relations between old and young.
在狩猎采集者的平等主义方面,现代最伟大的权威是英国人类学家詹姆斯·伍德伯恩,这是大家公认的。在战后的几十年里,伍德伯恩在坦桑尼亚的哈德扎人(Hadza)中进行了研究,这是一个觅食者社会。他还将他们与 San Bushmen 和 Mbuti Pygmies,以及非洲以外的其他一些小规模游牧觅食社会,如南印度的 Pandaram 或马来西亚的 Batek 进行了比较。8伍德伯恩认为,这些社会是我们所知道的唯一真正平等的社会,因为它们是唯一将平等延伸到性别关系,并尽可能延伸到老少关系的社会。
Focusing on such societies allowed Woodburn to sidestep the question of what is being equalized and what isn’t, because populations like the Hadza appear to apply principles of equality to just about everything it is possible to apply them to: not just material possessions, which are constantly being shared out or passed around, but herbal or sacred knowledge, prestige (talented hunters are systematically mocked and belittled), and so on. All such behaviour, Woodburn insisted, is based on a self-conscious ethos, that no one should ever be in a relation of ongoing dependency to anybody else. This echoes what we heard in the last chapter from Christopher Boehm about the ‘actuarial intelligence’ of egalitarian hunter-gatherers, but Woodburn adds a twist: the real defining feature of such societies is, precisely, the lack of any material surplus.
关注这样的社会让伍德伯恩避开了,即什么被平等化,什么没有被平等化的问题,因为像哈德萨人这样的人群似乎将平等的原则应用于几乎所有可能应用的东西:不仅仅是物质财富,这些东西不断被分享或传递,还有草药或神圣的知识、声望(有天赋的猎人被系统地嘲笑和贬低),等等。伍德本坚持认为,所有这些行为都是基于一种自觉的精神,即任何人都不应该持续依赖别人。这与我们在上一章听到的克里斯托弗·博姆关于平等主义的狩猎采集者的 “精算智慧” 相呼应,但伍德伯恩增加了一个转折:这种社会的真正决定性特征恰恰是缺乏任何物质剩余。
Truly egalitarian societies, for Woodburn, are those with ‘immediate return’ economies: food brought home is eaten the same day or the next; anything extra is shared out, but never preserved or stored. All this is in stark contrast to most foragers, and all pastoralists or farmers, who can be characterized as having ‘delayed return’ economies, regularly investing their energies in projects that only bear fruit at some point in the future. Such investments, he argues, inevitably lead to ongoing ties that can become the basis for some individuals to exercise power over others; what’s more, Woodburn assumes a certain ‘actuarial intelligence’ – Hadza and other egalitarian foragers understand all this perfectly well, and as a result they self-consciously avoid stockpiling resources or engaging in any long-term projects.
在伍德伯恩看来,真正的平等主义社会是那些具有 “即时回报” 经济的社会:带回家的食物在当天或第二天就被吃掉;多余的东西被分享出去,但从不保存或储存。所有这些都与大多数觅食者和所有牧民或农民形成鲜明对比,他们可以被描述为具有 “延迟回报” 经济,定期将他们的精力投入到只有在未来某个时候才会有结果的项目中。他认为,这种投资不可避免地会导致持续的联系,而这种联系会成为一些人对其他人行使权力的基础;更重要的是,伍德伯恩假设了某种 “精算智慧” —— 哈扎人和其他平等主义的觅食者完全了解这一切,因此他们自觉地避免储存资源或参与任何长期项目。
Far from rushing blindly for their chains like Rousseau’s savages, Woodburn’s ‘immediate return hunter-gatherers’ understand precisely where the chains of captivity loom, and organize much of their lives to keep away from them. This might sound like the basis of something hopeful or optimistic. Actually, it’s anything but. What it suggests is, again, that any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers. What kind of future might we then have in store? At best, we could perhaps imagine (with the invention of Star Trek replicators or other immediate-gratification devices) that it might be possible, at some point in the distant future, to create something like a society of equals once more. But in the meantime, we are definitively stuck. In other words, this is the Garden of Eden narrative all over again – just, this time, with the bar for paradise set even higher.
伍德本的 “立即返回的狩猎采集者” 并不像卢梭笔下的野蛮人那样盲目地冲向他们的枷锁,而是准确地了解被囚禁的枷锁在哪里,并组织他们的大部分生活以远离它们。这听起来可能是充满希望或乐观的东西的基础。事实上,它不是这样的。它所暗示的是,除了最简单的觅食者之外,任何有价值的平等基本上都是不可能的。那么我们可能会有什么样的未来呢?在最好的情况下,我们也许可以想象(随着《星际迷航》复制器或其他即时满足装置的发明),在遥远的未来的某个时刻,有可能再次创造一个类似平等的社会。但与此同时,我们肯定会被困住。换句话说,这又是一次伊甸园的叙事 —— 只是,这一次,天堂的标准设置得更高。
What’s really striking about Woodburn’s vision is that the foragers he focuses on appear to have reached such profoundly different conclusions from Kandiaronk, and several generations of First Nation critics before him, all of whom had trouble even imagining that differences of wealth could be translated into systematic inequalities of power. Recall that the American indigenous critique, as we described it in Chapter Two, was initially about something very different: the perceived failure of European societies to promote mutual aid and protect personal liberties. Only later, once indigenous intellectuals had more exposure to the workings of French and English society, did it come to focus on inequalities of property. Perhaps we should follow their initial train of thought.
伍德本的观点真正引人注目的是,他所关注的觅食者似乎与 Kandiaronk 以及在他之前的几代原住民批评家得出了如此深刻的结论,所有这些人甚至很难想象财富的差异可以转化为系统的权力不平等。回顾一下,我们在第二章中描述的美洲原住民批评,最初是关于一些非常不同的东西:认为欧洲社会未能促进互助和保护个人自由。只是后来,一旦本土知识分子更多地接触到法国和英国社会的运作,它才开始关注财产的不平等问题。也许我们应该遵循他们最初的思路。
Few anthropologists are particularly happy with the term ‘egalitarian societies’, for reasons that should now be obvious; but it lingers on because no one has suggested a compelling alternative. The closest we’re aware of is the feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s suggestion that most members of what are called egalitarian societies seem less interested in equality per se than what she calls ‘autonomy’. What matters to Montagnais-Naskapi women, for instance, is not so much whether men and women are seen to be of equal status but whether women are, individually or collectively, able to live their lives and make their own decisions without male interference.9
很少有人类学家对 “平等主义社会” 这个词感到特别满意,原因现在应该是显而易见的;但它仍然存在,因为没有人提出一个令人信服的替代方案。我们知道最接近的是女权主义人类学家埃莉诺·利考克的建议,即所谓的平等主义社会的大多数成员似乎对平等本身不感兴趣,而对她所说的 “自治” 感兴趣。例如,对 Montagnais-Naskapi 妇女来说,重要的不是男人和女人是否被视为地位平等,而是妇女是否能够在没有男性干预的情况下单独或集体地生活并做出自己的决定。9
In other words, if there is a value these women feel should be distributed equally, it is precisely what we would refer to as ‘freedom’. Perhaps the best thing, then, would be to call these ‘free societies’; or even, following the Jesuit Father Lallemant’s verdict on the Montagnais-Naskapi’s Wendat neighbours, ‘free people’, each of whom ‘considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.’10 At first glance, Wendat society, with its elaborate constitutional structure of chiefs, speakers and other office holders, might not seem an obvious choice for inclusion on a list of ‘egalitarian’ societies. But ‘chiefs’ are not really chiefs if they have no means to enforce orders. Equality, in societies such as those of the Wendat, was a direct consequence of individual liberty. Of course, the same can be said in reverse: liberties are not really liberties if one cannot act on them. Most people today also believe they live in free societies (indeed, they often insist that, politically at least, this is what is most important about their societies), but the freedoms which form the moral basis of a nation like the United States are, largely, formal freedoms.
换句话说,如果这些妇女认为有一种价值应该被平均分配,那正是我们所说的 “自由”。那么,也许最好的办法是将这些社会称为 “自由社会”;甚至,按照耶稣会神父 拉勒芒对 Montagnais-Naskapi 的温达特邻居的判断,称为 “自由人”,他们每个人都 “认为自己和其他人一样重要;他们只在自己高兴的情况下服从他们的酋长。10乍一看,温达特社会及其由酋长、发言人和其他官员组成的复杂的宪法结构,似乎不是列入” 平等主义 “社会名单的明显选择”。但是,如果 “酋长” 没有执行命令的手段,他们就不是真正的酋长。在温达特人这样的社会中,平等是个人自由的直接结果。当然,同样的道理也可以反过来说:如果一个人不能对其采取行动,那么自由就不是真正的自由。今天,大多数人也相信他们生活在自由的社会中(事实上,他们经常坚持认为,至少在政治上,这是他们的社会最重要的地方),但构成美洲这样的国家的道德基础的自由,主要是形式上的自由。
American citizens have the right to travel wherever they like – provided, of course, they have the money for transport and accommodation. They are free from ever having to obey the arbitrary orders of superiors – unless, of course, they have to get a job. In this sense, it is almost possible to say the Wendat had play chiefs11 and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms. Or to put the matter more technically: what the Hadza, Wendat or ‘egalitarian’ people such as the Nuer seem to have been concerned with were not so much formal freedoms as substantive ones.12 They were less interested in the right to travel than in the possibility of actually doing so (hence, the matter was typically framed as an obligation to provide hospitality to strangers). Mutual aid – what contemporary European observers often referred to as ‘communism’ – was seen as the necessary condition for individual autonomy.
美洲公民有权去他们喜欢的地方旅行 —— 当然,前提是他们有足够的钱支付交通和住宿。他们永远不必服从上级的任意命令 —— 当然,除非他们必须找到一份工作。在这个意义上,几乎可以说温达特人可以玩耍酋长11并拥有真正的自由,而我们今天的大多数人却不得不忍受真正的酋长,然后玩耍着自由。或者说得更专业一点:哈德萨人、温达特人或努尔人等 “平等主义” 的人所关心的,与其说是形式上的自由,不如说是实质上的自由。12他们对旅行的权利不感兴趣,而对实际旅行的可能性不感兴趣(因此,此事通常被描述为对陌生人提供招待的义务)。互助 —— 当代欧洲观察家经常称之为 “共产主义” —— 被认为是个人自主的必要条件。
This might help explain at least some of the apparent confusion around the term egalitarianism: it is possible for explicit hierarchies to emerge, but to nonetheless remain largely theatrical, or to confine themselves to very limited aspects of social life. Let us return for a moment to the Sudanese Nuer. Ever since the Oxford social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard published his classic ethnography of them in the 1940s, the Nuer were held out as the very paradigm for ‘egalitarian’ societies in Africa. They had nothing even remotely resembling institutions of government and were notorious for the high value they placed on personal independence. But by the 1960s, feminist anthropologists like Kathleen Gough were showing that, again, you couldn’t really speak of equality of status here: males in Nuer communities were divided between ‘aristocrats’ (with ancestral connections to the territories where they live), ‘strangers’ and lowly war captives taken by force in raids on other communities. Neither were these purely formal distinctions. While Evans-Pritchard had written off such differences as inconsequential, in reality, as Gough noted, difference in rank implied differential access to women. Only the aristocrats could easily assemble enough cattle to arrange what Nuer considered a ‘proper’ marriage – that is, one in which they could claim paternity over the children and thus be remembered as ancestors after their death.13
这至少有助于解释围绕着平等主义一词的一些明显的混乱:明确的等级制度有可能出现,但在很大程度上仍然是戏剧性的,或者仅限于社会生活的非常有限的方面。让我们再来看看苏丹努埃尔人的情况。自从牛津大学社会人类学家 E·E·埃文斯·普里查德在 1940 年代发表了他的经典民族志以来,努尔人就被认为是非洲 “平等主义” 社会的典范。他们没有任何类似于政府机构的东西,并因高度重视个人独立而臭名昭著。但到了 20 世纪 60 年代,凯瑟琳·高夫(Kathleen Gough)等女权主义人类学家表明,在这里你无法真正谈论地位的平等:努埃尔人社区的男性被分为 “贵族”(与他们居住的领土有祖先的联系)、“陌生人” 和在袭击其他社区时被强行带走的卑贱的战争俘虏。这些都不是纯粹的形式上的区分。虽然埃文斯·普里查德把这种差别写成无足轻重,但实际上,正如高夫所指出的,等级的不同意味着接触妇女的机会也不同。只有贵族才能轻易地聚集足够的牲畜来安排努尔人认为 “适当的” 婚姻 —— 也就是说,在这种婚姻中,他们可以,声称自己是孩子的父亲,从而在死后作为祖先被记住。13
So was Evans-Pritchard simply wrong? Not exactly. In fact, while rank and differential access to cattle became relevant when people were arranging marriages, they had almost no bearing in any other circumstances. It would have been impossible, even at a formal event like a dance or sacrifice, to determine who was ‘above’ anyone else. Most importantly, differences in wealth (cattle) never translated into the ability to give orders, or to demand formal obeisance. In an often-cited passage Evans-Pritchard wrote:
那么,埃文斯·普利察德只是错了吗?并非如此。事实上,虽然在人们安排婚姻时,等级和获得牛的机会不同是有关系的,但在其他任何情况下,它们几乎没有关系。即使在像舞蹈或祭祀这样的正式活动中,也不可能确定谁是 “高于” 其他人的。最重要的是,财富(牛)的差异从来没有转化为发号施令的能力,也没有要求正式的敬意。在一个经常被引用的段落中,埃文斯·普利察德写道。
That every Nuer considers himself as good as his neighbour is evident in their every movement. They strut about like lords of the earth, which, indeed, they consider themselves to be. There is no master and no servant in their society, but only equals who regard themselves as God’s noblest creation … even the suspicion of an order riles a man and he either does not carry it out or he carries it out in a casual and dilatory manner that is more insulting than a refusal.14
每个努尔人都认为自己和他的邻居一样好,这在他们的一举一动中显而易见。他们像地球的主人一样大摇大摆地走来走去,的确,他们认为自己是地球的主人。在他们的社会中没有主人和仆人,只有平等的人,他们认为自己是上帝最崇高的创造物…… 即使是对命令的怀疑也会激怒一个人,他要么不执行命令,要么以一种随意和拖延的方式执行命令,这比拒绝命令更具侮辱性。14
Evans-Pritchard is referring here to men. What about women?
埃文斯·普里查德在这里指的是男人。那么女性呢?
While in everyday affairs, Gough found, women operated with much the same independence as men, the marriage system did efface women’s freedom to a degree. If a man paid the forty cattle typically required for bridewealth, this meant above all that he not only had the right to claim paternity over a woman’s children but also acquired exclusive sexual access, which in turn usually meant the right to interfere with his wife’s affairs in other respects as well. However, most Nuer women were not ‘properly’ married. In fact, the complexities of the system were such that a large proportion found themselves officially married to ghosts, or to other women (who could be declared male for genealogical purposes) – in which case, how they went about becoming pregnant and raising their children was nobody’s business but their own. Even in sexual life, then, for women as for men, individual freedom was assumed unless there was some specific reason to curtail it.
高夫发现,虽然在日常事务中,妇女的独立性与男子基本相同,但婚姻制度确实在一定程度上削弱了妇女的自由。如果一个男人支付了通常需要的 40 头牛的聘金,这首先意味着他不仅有权要求成为女人孩子的父亲,而且还能获得专属的性接触权,这反过来又意味着他有权在其他方面干涉妻子的事务。然而,大多数努埃尔族妇女并没有 “适当” 结婚。事实上,由于制度的复杂性,很大一部分人发现自己已经正式嫁给了鬼魂,或者嫁给了其他妇女(为了家谱的目的,她们可以被宣布为男性) —— 在这种情况下,她们如何怀孕和抚养孩子,除了她们自己,没有人可以管。即使在性生活方面,对于女性和男性来说,个人自由也是假定的,除非有一些具体的理由来限制它。
The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do.15 If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court.
抛弃自己的社区的自由,知道自己会在遥远的地方受到欢迎;在社会结构之间来回转换的自由,这取决于一年的时间;不服从当局而不承担后果的自由 —— 所有这些在我们遥远的祖先中似乎都是简单的假设,即使大多数人今天发现它们几乎无法想象。人类可能没有在原始的纯真状态下开始他们的历史,但他们似乎是以一种自觉的厌恶被告知该做什么开始的。15如果是这样的话,我们至少可以完善我们最初的问题:真正的难题不是酋长,甚至国王和王后何时首次出现,而是何时不再有可能简单地把他们从法庭上嘲笑出去。
Now it is undoubtedly true that, over the broad sweep of history, we find ever larger and more settled populations, ever more powerful forces of production, ever larger material surpluses, and people spending ever more of their time under someone else’s command. It seems reasonable to conclude there is some sort of connection between these trends. But the nature of that connection, and the actual mechanisms, are entirely unclear. In contemporary societies we consider ourselves free people largely because we lack political overlords. For us, it’s simply assumed that what we call ‘the economy’ is organized entirely differently, on the basis not of freedom but ‘efficiency’, and therefore that offices and shop floors are typically arranged in strict chains of command. Unsurprising, then, that so much current speculation on the origins of inequality focuses on economic changes, and particularly the world of work.
现在,毫无疑问,在广泛的历史中,我们发现人口越来越多,越来越定居,生产力量越来越强大,物质盈余越来越多,人们在别人的指挥下花费的时间越来越多,这是事实。我们似乎有理由得出结论,这些趋势之间存在某种联系。但这种联系的性质和实际机制却完全不清楚。在当代社会,我们认为自己是自由人,主要是因为我们没有政治上的霸主。对我们来说,我们只是假设我们所谓的 “经济” 是完全不同的组织,其基础不是自由而是 “效率”,因此,办公室和车间通常是按照严格的指挥链安排的。因此,目前关于不平等的起源的许多猜测都集中在经济变化上,特别是工作领域,这并不令人惊讶。
Here too, we think, much of the available evidence has been widely misconstrued.
我们认为,在这里,许多现有的证据也被广泛地误解了。
A focus on work is not precisely the same as a focus on property, though if one is trying to understand how control of property first came to be translated into power of command, the world of work would be the obvious place to look. By framing the stages of human development largely around the ways people went about acquiring food, men like Adam Smith and Turgot inevitably put work – previously considered a somewhat plebeian concern – centre stage. There was a simple reason for this. It allowed them to claim that their own societies were self-evidently superior, a claim that – at the time – would have been much harder to defend had they used any criterion other than productive labour.16
对工作的关注与对财产的关注并不完全相同,尽管如果人们试图了解财产的控制权是如何首先转化为指挥权的,工作的世界将是一个明显的地方。亚当·斯密和杜尔哥等人主要围绕人们获取食物的方式来构筑人类发展的阶段,不可避免地将工作 —— 以前被认为是有点平民化的关切 —— 置于中心位置。这有一个简单的原因。这使他们能够宣称自己的社会是不言而喻的优越,而这种宣称 —— 在当时 —— 如果他们使用生产劳动以外的任何标准,就很难辩护。16
Turgot and Smith began writing this way in the 1750s. They referred to the apex of development as ‘commercial society’, in which a complex division of labour demanded the sacrifice of primitive liberties but guaranteed dazzling increases in overall wealth and prosperity. Over the next several decades, the invention of the spinning jenny, Arkwright loom and, eventually, steam and coal power – and finally the emergence of a permanent (and increasingly self-conscious) industrial working class – completely shifted the terms of debate. Suddenly, there existed forces of production previously undreamed of. But there was also a staggering increase in the number of hours that people were expected to work. In the new mills, twelve- to fifteen-hour days and six-day weeks were considered standard; holidays were minimal. (John Stuart Mill protested that ‘All the labour-saving machinery that has hitherto been invented has not lessened the toil of a single human being.’)
杜尔哥和斯密在 1750 年代开始以这种方式写作。 他们把发展的顶点称为 “商业社会”,在这个社会中,复杂的分工要求牺牲原始的自由,但保证了整体财富和繁荣的惊人增长。在接下来的几十年里,纺纱机、阿克莱特织布机以及最终的蒸汽和煤电的发明 —— 以及最终永久性(和日益自觉的)工业工人阶级的出现 —— 完全改变了辩论的条件。突然间,出现了以前从未梦想过的生产力量。但是,人们的工作时间也有了惊人的增加。在新的工厂里,每天 12 至 15 个小时和每周 6 天的工作时间被认为是标准的;假期也很少。(约翰·斯图亚特·米尔抗议说,“迄今为止,所有节省劳动力的机器都没有减少一个人的劳作”。)
As a result, and over the course of the nineteenth century, almost everyone arguing about the overall direction of human civilization took it for granted that technological progress was the prime mover of history, and that if progress was the story of human liberation, this could only mean liberation from ‘unnecessary toil’: at some future time, science would eventually free us from at least the most degrading, onerous and soul-destroying forms of work. In fact, by the Victorian era many began arguing that this was already happening. Industrialized farming and new labour-saving devices, they claimed, were already leading us towards a world where everyone would enjoy an existence of leisure and affluence – and where we wouldn’t have to spend most of our waking lives running about at someone else’s orders.
因此,在 19 世纪的过程中,几乎所有争论人类文明总体方向的人都想当然地认为,技术进步是历史的主要推动力,如果进步是人类解放的故事,这只能意味着从 “不必要的劳作” 中解放出来:在未来的某个时候,科学将最终使我们至少从最有辱人格、最繁重和最摧残灵魂的工作形式中解脱。事实上,到了维多利亚时代,许多人开始争辩说这已经在发生。他们声称,工业化的农业和新的省力设备已经在引导我们走向一个人人都能享受休闲和富裕生活的世界 —— 在那里,我们不必花大部分清醒的时间听从别人的命令。
Granted, this must have seemed a bizarre claim to radical trade unionists in Chicago who, as late as the 1880s, had to engage in pitched battles with police and company detectives in order to win an eight-hour day – that is, obtain the right to a daily work regime that the average medieval baron would have considered unreasonable to expect of his serfs.17 Yet, perhaps as a riposte to such campaigns, Victorian intellectuals began arguing that exactly the opposite was true: ‘primitive man’, they posited, had been engaged in a constant struggle for his very existence; life in early human societies was a perpetual chore. European or Chinese or Egyptian peasants toiled from dawn till dusk to eke out a living. And so, it followed, even the awful work regimes of the Dickensian age were actually an improvement on what had come before. All we are arguing about, they insisted, is the pace of improvement. By the dawn of the twentieth century, such reasoning had become universally accepted as common sense.
当然,对于芝加哥的激进工会成员来说,这肯定是一个奇怪的主张,他们在 19 世纪 80 年代就不得不与警察和公司侦探进行激烈的斗争,以赢得八小时工作制 —— 也就是说,获得每天工作制度的权利,一般中世纪的男爵会认为对他的农奴有不合理的要求。17然而,也许作为对这种运动的反击,维多利亚时代的知识分子开始争论,事实恰恰相反:他们认为,“原始人” 一直在为自己的生存进行不断的斗争;早期人类社会的生活是一个永恒的苦差。欧洲、中国或埃及的农民从黎明到黄昏都在为生计奔波。因此,据此,即使是狄更斯时代的可怕的工作制度,实际上也是对以前的改进。他们坚持认为,我们所争论的只是改进的速度。到 20 世纪初,这种推理已经被普遍接受为常识。
That is what made Marshall Sahlins’s 1968 essay ‘The Original Affluent Society’ such an epochal event, and is why we must now consider both some of its implications and its limitations. Probably the most influential anthropological essay ever written, it turned that old Victorian wisdom – still prevalent in the 1960s – on its head, creating instant discussion and debate, inspiring everyone from socialists to hippies. Whole schools of thought (Primitivism, Degrowth) would likely have never come about without it. But Sahlins was also writing at a time when archaeologists still knew relatively little about pre-agricultural peoples, at least compared to what we know now. It might be best, then, first to take a look at his argument before turning to the evidence we have today and seeing how the piece measures up against it.
这就是马歇尔·萨林斯 1968 年的文章《原始的富裕社会》成为划时代的事件的原因,也是我们现在必须考虑其一些影响和局限性的原因。这篇文章可能是有史以来最具影响力的人类学论文,它颠覆了维多利亚时代的古老智慧 —— 在 20 世纪 60 年代仍然盛行,引起了即时的讨论和辩论,激发了从社会主义者到嬉皮士的所有人。如果没有它,整个思想流派(Primitivism, Degrowth)可能永远不会出现。但萨林斯写作的时候,考古学家对前农业人口的了解还比较少,至少与我们现在的了解相比是如此。因此,最好先看看他的论点,然后再转向我们今天所掌握的证据,看看这篇文章如何与之抗衡。
Marshall Sahlins started his career in the late 1950s as a neo-evolutionist. When ‘The Original Affluent Society’ was published, he was still most famous for his work with Elman Service which proposed four stages of human political development: from bands to tribes, chiefdoms and states. All these terms are still widely used today. In 1968, Sahlins accepted an invitation to spend a year in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s laboratoire in Paris, where, he later reported, he used to eat lunch in the cafeteria each day with Pierre Clastres (who would go on to write Society Against the State), arguing about ethnographic data and whether or not society was ripe for revolution.
马歇尔·萨林斯在 20 世纪 50 年代末作为一个新进化论者开始了他的职业生涯。当《原始的富裕社会》出版时,他最有名的还是他与埃尔曼服务的工作,提出了人类政治发展的四个阶段:从部落到部落、酋长国和国家。所有这些术语今天仍被广泛使用。1968 年,萨林斯接受邀请,在巴黎的克劳德·列维·斯特劳斯的实验室呆了一年,据他后来报告,他每天都和皮埃尔·克拉斯特尔(他后来写了《反国家的社会》)在食堂吃午饭,争论人种学数据和社会是否已经成熟可以进行革命。
These were heady days in French universities, full of student mobilizations and street fighting that ultimately led up to the student/worker insurrection of May 1968 (during which Lévi-Strauss maintained a haughty neutrality, but Sahlins and Clastres became enthusiastic participants). In the midst of all this political ferment, the nature of work, the need for work, the refusal of work, the possibility of gradually eliminating work were all heated matters of debate in both political and intellectual circles.
在法国的大学里,那是一段令人振奋的日子,充满了学生动员和街头斗争,最终导致了 1968 年 5 月的学生/工人暴动(在这期间,列维·斯特劳斯保持着傲慢的中立,但萨林斯和克拉斯特尔成为热情的参与者)。在所有这些政治发酵中,工作的性质、对工作的需要、对工作的拒绝、逐渐消除工作的可能性,都是政治和知识界激烈辩论的问题。
Sahlins’s essay, perhaps the last truly great example of that genre of ‘speculative prehistory’ invented by Rousseau, first appeared in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes .18 It made the argument that, at least when it comes to working hours, the Victorian narrative of continual improvement is simply backwards. Technological evolution has not liberated people from material necessity. People are not working less. All the evidence, he argued, suggests that over the course of human history the overall number of hours most people spend working has tended instead to increase. Even more provocatively, Sahlins insisted that people in earlier ages were not, necessarily, poorer than modern-day consumers. In fact, he contended, for much of our early history humans might just as easily be said to have lived lives of great material abundance.
萨林斯的文章,也许是卢梭发明的 “推测性史前史” 类型的最后一个真正伟大的例子,首次出现在让·保罗·萨特的杂志《现代时代》上。18它提出的论点是,至少在工作时间方面,维多利亚时代关于持续改进的叙述是完全倒退的。技术的发展并没有将人们从物质需求中解放出来。人们并没有减少工作。他认为,所有的证据表明,在人类历史上,大多数人花在工作上的总时数反而趋于增加。更具挑衅性的是,萨林斯坚持认为,早期的人们并不一定比现代的消费者更穷。事实上,他认为,在我们早期历史的大部分时间里,人类可能很容易被说成是过着物质丰富的生活。
True, a forager might seem extremely poor by our standards – but to apply our standards was obviously ridiculous. ‘Abundance’ is not an absolute measure. It refers to a situation where one has easy access to everything one feels one needs to live a happy and comfortable life. By those standards, Sahlins argued, most known foragers are rich. The fact that many hunter-gatherers, and even horticulturalists, only seem to have spent somewhere between two and four hours a day doing anything that could be construed as ‘work’ was itself proof of how easy their needs were to satisfy.
诚然,按照我们的标准,一个觅食者可能显得极其贫穷 —— 但采用我们的标准显然是可笑的。富裕 “不是一个绝对的衡量标准。它指的是一种情况,在这种情况下,一个人可以很容易地获得他觉得自己需要的一切,过上幸福和舒适的生活。萨林斯认为,按照这些标准,大多数已知的觅食者都很富有。许多狩猎采集者,甚至园艺家,似乎每天只花两到四个小时做任何可以被理解为 “工作” 的事情,这一事实本身就证明了他们的需求是多么容易满足。
Before continuing, it’s worth saying that the broad picture Sahlins presented appears to be correct. As we pointed out above, the average oppressed medieval serf still worked less than a modern nine-to-five office or factory worker, and the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who dragged great slabs to build Stonehenge almost certainly worked, on average, less than that. It’s only very recently that even the richest countries have begun to turn such things around (obviously, most of us are not working as many hours as Victorian stevedores, though the overall decline in working hours is probably not as dramatic as we think). And for much of the world’s population, things are still getting worse instead of better.
在继续之前,值得一提的是,萨林斯提出的大体情况似乎是正确的。正如我们在上面指出的,中世纪受压迫的农奴的平均工作时间仍然低于现代朝九晚五的办公室或工厂工人,而拖着大石板建造巨石阵的榛子采集者和牧牛人的平均工作时间几乎肯定低于这个数字。只是在最近,即使是最富有的国家也开始扭转这种局面(显然,我们大多数人,工作时间没有维多利亚时代的装卸工人那么多,尽管工作时间的整体下降可能没有我们想象的那么戏剧性)。而对于世界上的大部分人口来说,情况仍然在恶化,而不是好转。
What stands the test of time less well is the image that most readers take away from Sahlins’s essay: of happy-go-lucky hunter-gatherers, spending most of their time lounging in the shade, flirting, forming drum circles or telling stories. And this has everything to do with the ethnographic examples he was drawing on, largely the San, Mbuti and Hadza.
不太经得起时间考验的是大多数读者从萨林斯的文章中得到的印象:快乐的狩猎采集者,大部分时间在树荫下闲逛、调情、组成鼓圈或讲故事。而这与他所借鉴的人种学例子有很大关系,主要是桑人、姆布蒂人和哈德扎人。
In the last chapter, we suggested a number of reasons why!Kung San (Bushmen) on the margins of the Kalahari and Hadza of the Serengeti Plateau became so popular in the 1960s as exemplars of what early human society might have been like (despite being quite unusual, as foragers go). One reason was simply the availability of data: by the 1960s, they were among the only foraging populations left who still maintained something like their traditional mode of life. It was also in this decade that anthropologists started carrying out time-allocation studies, recording systematically what members of different societies do over the course of a typical day and how much time they spend doing it.19 Such research with African foragers also seemed to resonate with the famous discoveries of fossil hominins then being made by Louis and Mary Leakey in other parts of the continent, such as Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Since some of these modern hunter-gatherers were living in savannah-like environments, not unlike the ones in which our species now appeared to have evolved, it was tempting to imagine that here – in these living populations – one might catch a glimpse of human society in something like its original state.
在上一章中,我们提出了一些原因!卡拉哈里沙漠边缘的 Kung San(布须曼人)和塞伦盖蒂高原的 Hadza 在 20 世纪 60 年代作为早期人类社会的典范变得如此受欢迎(尽管就觅食者而言,他们很不寻常)。其中一个原因是数据的可得性:到 20 世纪 60 年代,他们是仅存的仍然保持着类似传统生活方式的觅食人群之一。也是在这十年里,人类学家开始进行时间分配研究,系统地记录不同社会的成员在典型的一天中做什么以及他们花了多少时间。19对非洲觅食者的这种研究似乎也与路易斯和玛丽·利基当时在非洲大陆其他地区(如坦桑尼亚的奥杜威峡谷)发现的著名人类化石产生了共鸣。由于这些现代狩猎采集者中的一些人生活在类似于大草原的环境中,与我们的物种现在似乎已经进化的环境不一样,所以很容易想象在这里 —— 在这些活着的人群中 —— 人们可能会瞥见人类社会的一些原始状态。
Moreover, the results of those early time-allocation studies came as an enormous surprise. It’s worth bearing in mind that, in the post-war decades, most anthropologists and archaeologists still very much took for granted the old nineteenth-century narrative of humanity’s primordial ‘struggle for existence’. To our ears, much of the rhetoric commonplace at the time, even among the most sophisticated scholars, sounds startlingly condescending: ‘A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat,’ wrote the prehistorian Robert Braidwood in 1957, ‘or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himself.’20 Yet these first quantitative studies comprehensively disproved such pronouncements. They showed that, even in quite inhospitable environments like the deserts of Namibia or Botswana, foragers could easily feed everyone in their group and still have three to five days per week left for engaging in such extremely human activities as gossiping, arguing, playing games, dancing or travelling for pleasure.
此外,这些早期的时间分配研究的结果是一个巨大的惊喜。值得注意的是,在战后的几十年里,大多数人类学家和考古学家仍然非常理所当然地认为 19 世纪人类的原始 “生存斗争” 的旧说法。在我们听来,许多当时常见的言辞,甚至在最成熟的学者中,听起来都是令人吃惊的居高临下。 史前学家罗伯特·布雷德伍德在 1957 年写道:“一个人如果一生都在跟踪动物,只是为了杀死它们来吃,或者从一个浆果地移动到另一个浆果地,他实际上就像一个动物一样生活。”20然而,这些最早的定量研究全面地推翻了这种说法。他们表明,即使在像纳米比亚或博茨瓦纳的沙漠这样相当荒凉的环境中,觅食者可以很容易地养活他们群体中的每一个人,并且每周仍然有三到五天的时间来从事诸如闲谈、争论、玩游戏、跳舞或旅行取乐等极其人性化的活动。
Researchers in the 1960s were also beginning to realize that, far from agriculture being some sort of remarkable scientific advance, foragers (who after all tended to be intimately familiar with all aspects of the growing cycles of food plants) were perfectly aware of how one might go about planting and harvesting grains and vegetables. They just didn’t see any reason why they should. ‘Why should we plant,’ one!Kung informant put it – in a phrase cited ever since in a thousand treatises on the origins of farming – ‘when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’ Indeed, concluded Sahlins, what some prehistorians had assumed to be technical ignorance was really a self-conscious social decision: such foragers had ‘rejected the Neolithic Revolution in order to keep their leisure’.21 Anthropologists were still struggling to come to terms with all this when Sahlins stepped in to draw the larger conclusions.
20 世纪 60 年代的研究人员也开始意识到,农业远不是某种了不起的科学进步,觅食者(毕竟他们往往对食物植物生长周期的所有方面都非常熟悉)完全了解人们如何去种植和收获谷物和蔬菜。他们只是不明白为什么要这样做。“我们为什么要种植?”,一位 Kung 知情者说 —— 这句话被无数关于农业起源的论文所引用 —— “世界上有那么多的 mongongo 坚果,我们为什么要种植?” 事实上,萨林斯总结说,一些史前学家认为是技术上的无知,实际上是一种自觉的社会决定:这些觅食者 “拒绝了新石器时代的革命,以保持他们的休闲”。21当萨林斯介入并得出更大的结论时,人类学家仍在努力接受这一切。
The ancient forager ethos of leisure (the ‘Zen road to affluence’) only broke down, or so Sahlins surmised, when people finally – for whatever reasons – began to settle in one place and accept the toils of agriculture. They did so at a terrible cost. It wasn’t just ever-increasing hours of toil that followed but, for most, poverty, disease, war and slavery – all fuelled by endless competition and the mindless pursuit of new pleasures, new powers and new forms of wealth. With one deft move, Sahlins’s ‘Original Affluent Society’ used the results of time-allocation studies to pull the rug from under the traditional story of human civilization. Like Woodburn, Sahlins brushes aside Rousseau’s version of the Fall – the idea that, too foolish to reflect on the likely consequences of our actions in assembling, stockpiling and guarding property, we ‘ran blindly for our chains’22 – and takes us straight back to the Garden of Eden. If rejecting farming was a conscious choice, then so was that act of embracing it. We chose to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and for this we were punished. As St Augustine put it, we rebelled against God, and God’s judgment was to cause our own desires to rebel against our rational good sense; our punishment for original sin is the infinity of our new desires.23
古代觅食者的休闲精神(“通往富裕的禅道”)只有在人们最终 —— 无论出于何种原因 —— 开始在一个地方定居并接受农业的劳作时才会瓦解,或者说萨林斯是这样推测的。他们这样做付出了可怕的代价。随之而来的不仅仅是不断增加的劳作时间,对大多数人来说,还有贫穷、疾病、战争和奴役 —— 所有这些都被无休止的竞争和对新的快乐、新的力量和新的财富形式的无意识追求所助长。萨赫林斯的 “原始富裕社会” 用时间分配研究的结果,从人类文明的传统故事中抽出了一块地毯。像伍德伯恩一样,萨赫林斯把卢梭关于堕落的说法抛在一边 —— 他认为,由于太过愚蠢,无法思考我们在组装、储存和保护财产的行为可能带来的后果,我们 “盲目地奔向我们的枷锁”22- 并把我们直接带回到,回到伊甸园。如果拒绝耕种是一种有意识的选择,那么拥抱耕种的行为也是如此。我们选择吃知识树上的果子,为此我们受到了惩罚。正如圣奥古斯丁所说,我们叛逆了上帝,而上帝的审判是使我们自己的欲望叛逆了我们的理性良知;我们对原罪的惩罚是我们新欲望的无限大。23
If there is a fundamental difference here from the biblical story, it’s that the Fall (according to Sahlins) didn’t happen just once. We didn’t collapse and then begin slowly to pull ourselves back up. When it comes to labour and affluence, every new technological breakthrough seems to cause us to fall yet further.
如果说这里与《圣经》故事有什么根本的不同,那就是堕落(根据萨林斯的说法)并不是只发生一次。我们并没有崩溃,然后开始慢慢地把自己拉回来。当涉及到劳动和富裕时,每一个新的技术突破似乎都会使我们进一步堕落。
Sahlins’s piece is a brilliant morality tale. There is, however, one obvious flaw. The whole argument for an ‘original affluent society’ rested on a single fragile premise: that most prehistoric humans really did live in the specific manner of African foragers. As Sahlins was perfectly willing to admit, this was just a guess. In closing his essay, he asked whether ‘marginal hunters such as the Bushmen of the Kalahari’ really were any more representative of the Palaeolithic condition than the foragers of California (who placed great value on hard work) or the Northwest Coast (with their ranked societies and stockpiles of wealth)? Perhaps not, Sahlins conceded.24 This often overlooked observation is crucial. It’s not that Sahlins is suggesting that his own phrase ‘original affluent society’ is incorrect. Rather, he acknowledges that, just as there might have been many ways for free peoples to be free, there might have been more than just one way for (original) affluent societies to be affluent.
萨林斯的作品是一个出色的道德故事。然而,有一个明显的缺陷。整个关于 “原始富裕社会” 的论点建立在一个脆弱的前提上:大多数史前人类确实以非洲牧民的特定方式生活。正如萨林斯完全愿意承认的那样,这只是一种猜测。在文章的最后,他问道:“像卡拉哈里的布须曼人这样的边缘猎手” 是否真的比加利福尼亚(非常重视辛勤工作)或西北海岸(有等级社会和财富储备)的觅食者更能代表旧石器时代的状况?也许不是,萨林斯承认。24这个经常被忽视的观察是至关重要的。这并不是说萨林斯在暗示他自己的 “原始富裕社会” 的说法是不正确的。相反,他承认,正如自由的人民可能有许多方式获得自由一样,(原始)富裕的社会可能有不止一种方式获得富裕。
Not all modern hunter-gatherers value leisure over hard work, just as not all share the easy-going attitudes towards personal possessions of the!Kung or Hadza. Foragers in northwestern California, for instance, were notorious for their cupidity, organizing much of their lives around the accumulation of shell money and sacred treasures and adhering to a stringent work ethic in order to do so. The fisher-foragers of the Canadian Northwest Coast, on the other hand, lived in highly stratified societies where commoners and slaves were famously industrious. According to one of their ethnographers, the Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island were not only well housed and fed, but lavishly supplied: ‘Each household made and possessed many mats, boxes, cedar-bark and fur blankets, wooden dishes, horn spoons, and canoes. It was as though in manufacturing as well as in food production there was no point at which further expenditure of effort in the production of more of the same items was felt to be superfluous.’25 Not only did the Kwakiutl surround themselves with endless piles of possessions, but they also put endless creativity into designing and crafting them, with results so striking and intricately beautiful as to make them the pride of ethnographic museums the world over. (Lévi-Strauss remarked that turn-of-the-century Kwakiutl were like a society where a dozen different Picassos were operative all at the same time.) This, surely, is a kind of affluence. But one entirely different from that of the!Kung or Mbuti.
并非所有的现代狩猎采集者都重视休闲而不是辛勤工作,就像并非所有的人都对个人财产抱有轻松的态度!Kung 或 Hadza。例如,加利福尼亚西北部的觅食者因其贪婪而臭名昭著,他们的生活大多围绕着贝壳钱和圣物的积累,并为此坚持严格的工作道德。另一方面,加拿大西北海岸的渔民生活在高度分层的社会中,平民和奴隶都非常勤劳。根据他们的一位民族学家的说法,温哥华岛的 Kwakiutl 人不仅住得好,吃得好,而且供应丰富:“每个家庭都制作并拥有许多垫子、盒子、杉树皮和毛皮毯子、木盘、牛角勺子和独木舟。就好像在制造和食品生产中,没有任何一点会让人觉得进一步花费精力生产更多相同的物品是多余的。25Kwakiutl 人不仅用无穷无尽的财物围绕着自己,而且还用无穷无尽的创造力来设计和制作这些财物,其结果是如此引人注目和复杂美丽,使它们成为全世界民族学博物馆的骄傲。(莱维·斯特劳斯说,本世纪初的 Kwakiutl 人就像一个社会,有一打不同的毕加索同时在工作。)这当然是一种富足。但是,这与 Kung 或 Mbuti 人的情况完全不同。
Which, then, more resembled the original state of human affairs: the easy-going Hadza, or the industrious foragers of northwestern California? By now it will be clear to the reader that this is just the kind of question we shouldn’t be asking. There was no truly ‘original’ state of affairs. Anyone who insists that one exists is by definition trading in myths (Sahlins, at least, was fairly honest about this). Human beings had many tens of thousands of years to experiment with different ways of life, long before any of them turned their hands to agriculture. Instead we might do better to look at the overall direction of change, so as to understand how it bears on our question: how humans came largely to lose the flexibility and freedom that seems once to have characterized our social arrangements, and ended up stuck in permanent relations of dominance and subordination.
那么,哪一个更像人类的原始状态:是随和的哈德萨人,还是加利福尼亚西北部勤劳的觅食者?现在,读者会明白,这正是我们不应该问的那种问题。并不存在真正的 “原始” 状态。任何坚持认为存在原始状态的人,顾名思义都是在进行神话交易(至少萨林斯在这方面是相当诚实的)。人类有几万年的时间来尝试不同的生活方式,在他们中的任何一个人转而从事农业之前很长时间。相反,我们最好看看整体的变化方向,以便理解它如何影响我们的问题:人类如何在很大程度上失去了灵活和自由,而这似乎曾经是我们社会安排的特点,并最终陷入了永久的统治和从属关系。
To do this means continuing the story begun in Chapter Three, following our foraging ancestors out of the Ice Age (or Pleistocene era) into a phase of warmer global climate known as the Holocene. This will also take us far outside Europe, to places like Japan and the Caribbean coast of North America, where entirely new and unsuspected pasts are beginning to emerge; ones which – despite the stubborn efforts of scholars to shoehorn them into neat evolutionary boxes – look about as far from small, nomadic, egalitarian ‘bands’ as one can possibly imagine.
要做到这一点,就意味着继续第三章开始的故事,跟随我们的觅食祖先走出冰河时代(或更新世时代),进入一个被称为全新世的全球气候温暖阶段。这也将把我们带到欧洲以外的地方,如日本和北美的加勒比海岸,那里开始出现全新的和未曾预料到的过去;那些 —— 尽管学者们顽强地将它们塞进整齐的进化盒子里 —— 看起来与人们可能想象的小型、游牧、平等主义的 “族群” 相去甚远。
In modern-day Louisiana there is a place with the dispiriting name of Poverty Point. Here you can still see the remains of massive earthworks erected by Native Americans around 1600 BC . With its plush green lawns and well-trained coppices, today the site looks like something halfway between a wildlife management area and a golf club.26 Grass-covered mounds and ridges rise neatly from carefully tended meadows, forming concentric rings which suddenly vanish where the Bayou Macon has eroded them away (bayou being derived, via Louisiana French, from the Choctaw word bayuk: marshy rivulets spreading out from the main channel of the Mississippi). Despite nature’s best efforts to obliterate these earthworks, and early European settlers’ best efforts to deny their obvious significance (perhaps these were the dwellings of an ancient race of giants, they conjectured, or one of the lost tribes of Israel?), they endure: evidence for an ancient civilization of the Lower Mississippi and testimony to the scale of its accomplishments.
在现代的路易斯安那州,有一个名字叫 “贫困点” 的地方令人沮丧。在这里,你仍然可以看到美洲原住民在公元前 1600 年左右建立的大规模土楼的遗迹。这里有茂密的绿色草坪和训练有素的灌木丛,今天这里看起来就像野生动物管理区和高尔夫俱乐部的中间地带。26被草覆盖的小丘和山脊从精心照料的草地上整齐地升起,形成同心圆,在马孔河口侵蚀的地方突然消失(河口,bayou这个词是通过路易斯安那州的法语引入的,来自乔克托语的 bayuk:从密西西比河主河道蔓延出来的沼泽小河)。尽管大自然竭力想抹去这些土楼,而且早期的欧洲定居者也竭力否认它们的明显意义(他们猜想,这些也许是古代巨人种族的住所,或者是以色列失落的部落之一),但它们仍然存在:是密西西比河下游古代文明的证据,也是其成就规模的见证。
Archaeologists believe these structures at Poverty Point formed a monumental precinct that once extended over 200 hectares, flanked by two enormous earthen mounds (the so-called Motley and Lower Jackson Mounds) which lie respectively north and south. To clarify what this means, it’s worth noting that the first Eurasian cities – early centres of civic life like Uruk in southern Iraq, or Harappa in the Punjab – began as settlements of roughly 200 hectares in total. Which is to say that their entire layout could fit quite comfortably within the ceremonial precinct of Poverty Point. Like those early Eurasian cities, Poverty Point sprang from a great river, since transport by water, particularly of bulk goods, was in early times infinitely easier than transport by land. Like them, it formed the core of a much larger sphere of cultural interaction. People and resources came to Poverty Point from hundreds of miles away, as far north as the Great Lakes and from the Gulf of Mexico to the south.
考古学家认为,位于贫困点的这些建筑形成了一个纪念碑式的区域,其面积一度超过 200 公顷,两侧是两个巨大的土丘(所谓的莫特利丘和下杰克逊丘),分别位于北部和南部。为了澄清这一点,值得注意的是,最早的欧亚城市 —— 像伊拉克南部的乌鲁克或旁遮普的哈拉帕这样的早期公民生活中心 —— 开始时是总面积约为 200 公顷的定居点。这就是说,他们的整个布局可以很舒适地容纳在贫困点的礼仪区。像那些早期的欧亚城市一样,贫困点也是源于一条大河,因为在早期,水路运输,特别是大宗货物的运输,比陆路运输要容易得多。与他们一样,它形成了一个更大的文化互动领域的核心。人们和资源从数百英里之外来到贫困点,北至大湖区,南至墨西哥湾。
Seen from the air – a ‘god’s-eye’ view – Poverty Point’s standing remains look like some sunken, gargantuan amphitheatre; a place of crowds and power, worthy of any great agrarian civilization. Something approaching a million cubic metres of soil was moved to create its ceremonial infrastructure, which was most likely oriented to the skies, since some of its mounds form enormous figures of birds, inviting the heavens to bear witness to their presence. But the people of Poverty Point weren’t farmers. Nor did they use writing. They were hunters, fishers and foragers, exploiting a superabundance of wild resources (fish, deer, nuts, waterfowl) in the lower reaches of the Mississippi. And they were not the first hunter-gatherers in this region to establish traditions of public architecture. These traditions can be traced back far beyond Poverty Point itself, to around 3500 BC – which is also roughly the time that cities first emerged in Eurasia.
从空中看 —— 一个 “上帝之眼” 的视角 —— 贫困点的遗迹看起来就像某个下沉的巨大的圆形剧场;一个人群和权力的地方,值得表明任何伟大的农业文明。为了建造仪式性的基础设施,人们搬动了近一百万立方米的土壤,这很可能是面向天空的,因为它的一些土堆形成了巨大的鸟的形象,邀请上天见证他们的存在。但贫困点的人不是农民。他们也没有使用文字。他们是猎人、渔民和觅食者,利用密西西比河下游丰富的野生资源(鱼、鹿、坚果、水禽)。而且他们并不是这个地区第一个建立公共建筑传统的狩猎采集者。这些传统可以追溯到遥远的贫困点本身,大约在公元前 3500 年 —— 这也是欧亚大陆首次出现城市的时间。
As archaeologists often point out, Poverty Point is ‘a Stone Age site in an area where there is no stone’, so the staggering quantities of lithic tools, weapons, vessels and lapidary ornaments found there must all have been originally carried from somewhere else.27 The scale of its earthworks implies thousands of people gathering at the site at particular times of year, in numbers outstripping any historically known hunter-gatherer population. Much less clear is what attracted them there with their native copper, flint, quartz crystal, soapstone and other minerals; or how often they came, and how long they stayed. We simply don’t know.
正如考古学家经常指出的那样,贫困点是 “在一个没有石头的地方的石器时代遗址”,所以在那里发现的数量惊人的石器工具、武器、容器和玉石装饰品一定都是最初从其他地方运来。27其土方工程的规模意味着成千上万的人在一年中的特定时间聚集在该地点,其数量超过了历史上已知的任何狩猎·采集人口。不太清楚的是,是什么吸引了他们,他们用当地的铜、燧石、石英晶体、肥皂石和其他矿物吸引了他们;或者他们多长时间来一次,以及他们停留多长时间。我们根本不知道。
What we do know is that Poverty Point arrows and spearheads come in rich hues of red, black, yellow and even blue stone, and these are only the colours we discern. Ancient classifications were no doubt more refined. If stones were being selected with such care, we can only begin to imagine what was going on with cords, fibres, medicines and any living thing in the landscape treated as potential food or poison. Another thing we can be quite sure of is that ‘trade’ is not a useful way to describe whatever was going on here. For one thing, trade goes two ways, and Poverty Point presents no clear evidence for exports, or indeed commodities of any sort. The absence is strikingly obvious to anyone who’s studied the remains of early Eurasian cities like Uruk and Harappa, which do seem to have been engaged in lively trade relations: these sites are awash with industrial quantities of ceramic packaging, and the products of their urban crafts are found far and wide.
我们所知道的是,贫困点的箭和矛头有丰富的红色、黑色、黄色甚至蓝色石头的色调,而这些只是我们辨别的颜色。古代的分类方法无疑更加精细。如果石头被如此仔细地挑选,我们只能开始想象在绳索、纤维、药物和任何被视为潜在食物或毒药的景观中发生了什么。另一件我们可以非常肯定的事情是,“贸易” 并不是描述这里所发生的一切的有效方式。首先,贸易是双向的,而贫困点没有提供出口的明确证据,也没有提供任何种类的商品。对于研究过乌鲁克和哈拉帕等欧亚早期城市遗迹的人来说,这种缺失是非常明显的,这些城市似乎确实参与了活跃的贸易关系:这些遗址中充斥着大量的陶瓷,他们的城市手工业产品被发现得很远很广。
Despite its great cultural reach, there is nothing at all of this commodity culture at Poverty Point. In fact, it’s not clear if anything much was going out from the site, at least in material terms, other than certain enigmatic clay items known as ‘cooking balls’, which can hardly be considered trade goods. Textiles and fabrics may have been important, but we also have to allow for the possibility that Poverty Point’s greatest assets were intangible. Most experts today view its monuments as expressions of sacred geometry, linked to calendar counts and the movement of celestial bodies. If anything was being stockpiled at Poverty Point, it may well have been knowledge: the intellectual property of rituals, vision quests, songs, dances and images.28
尽管其文化影响力很大,但在贫困点根本没有这种商品文化。事实上,除了某些被称为 “烹饪球” 的神秘粘土制品外,还不清楚是否有什么东西从该遗址流出,至少在物质方面,这些东西很难被视为贸易品。纺织品和织物可能很重要,但我们也必须考虑到贫困点最大的资产可能是无形的。今天,大多数专家认为它的纪念碑是神圣的几何学的表现,与日历计数和天体的运动有关。如果有什么东西被储存在贫困点,那很可能是知识:仪式、视觉探索、歌曲、舞蹈和图像的知识财产。28
We can’t possibly know the details. But it’s more than just speculation to say that ancient foragers were exchanging complex information across this entire region, and in a highly controlled fashion. Material proof comes from close examination of the earthen monuments themselves. Through the great valley of the Mississippi, and some considerable way beyond, there exist other smaller sites of the same period. The various configurations of their mounds and ridges adhere to strikingly uniform geometrical principles, based on standard units of measurement and proportion apparently shared by early peoples throughout a significant portion of the Americas. The underlying system of calculus appears to have been based on the transformational properties of equilateral triangles, figured out with the aid of cords and strings, and then extended to the laying-out of massive earthworks.
我们不可能知道这些细节。但如果说古代觅食者在整个地区以高度控制的方式交换复杂的信息,这就不仅仅是推测了。物质证明来自于对土质纪念碑本身的仔细检查。在密西西比河的大河谷中,以及相当长的一段距离之外,还存在着同一时期的其他小型遗址。他们的土丘和山脊的各种配置都遵循惊人的统一的几何原则,基于标准的测量单位和比例,显然是整个美洲大部分地区的早期人民所共有的。基本的微积分系统似乎是基于等边三角形的转换特性,借助绳索和线来计算,然后延伸到大规模土方工程的铺设。
Published in 2004, this remarkable discovery by John E. Clark, an archaeologist and authority on the pre-Columbian societies of Mesoamerica,29 has been greeted by the scholarly community with responses ranging from lukewarm acceptance to plain disbelief, although nobody appears to have actually refuted it. Many prefer simply to ignore it. Clark himself seems surprised by his results. We will return to some wider implications in Chapter Eleven, but for now we can simply note an assessment of Clark’s findings by two specialists in the field, who accept the evidence he presents ‘not only for a standard unit of measurement but also for geometrical layouts and spacing intervals among first-mound complexes from Louisiana to Mexico and Peru, which incorporate multiples of that standard’. At most, finding the same system of measurement across such distances may prove to be ‘one of contemporary archaeology’s most provocative revelations’, and at the very least, they conclude, ‘those who built the works were not simple, ordinary foragers.’30
考古学家和中美洲前哥伦比亚社会的权威约翰·克拉克的这一非凡发现发表于 2004 年。29学术界对这一发现的反应从冷淡的接受到完全不相信,尽管似乎没有人真正反驳它。许多人宁愿直接忽略它。克拉克本人似乎也对他的结果感到惊讶。我们将在第十一章讨论一些更广泛的影响,但现在我们可以简单地注意到该领域的两位专家对克拉克发现的评估,他们接受他提出的证据,“不仅是一个标准的测量单位,还有从路易斯安那州到墨西哥和秘鲁的第一座土丘群的几何布局和间隔,其中包含了该标准的倍数”。最多,在这么远的地方发现相同的测量系统可能被证明是 “当代考古学最具有挑战性的启示之一”,至少,他们得出结论,“那些建造工程的人不是简单、普通的觅食者。”30
Putting aside the (by now irrelevant) notion that there ever was such a thing as ‘simple, ordinary foragers’, it has to be said that, even if Clark’s theory were true only for the Lower Mississippi and surrounding parts of the Eastern Woodlands,31 it would still be quite remarkable. For, unless we are dealing with some kind of amazing cosmic coincidence, it means that someone had to convey knowledge of geometric and mathematical techniques for making accurate spatial measurements, and related forms of labour organization, over very long distances. If this were the case, it seems likely that they also shared other forms of knowledge as well: cosmology, geology, philosophy, medicine, ethics, fauna, flora, ideas about property, social structure, and aesthetics.
撇开 “简单的、普通的觅食者” 这一概念(现在已经无关紧要了),不得不说,即使克拉克的理论只在密西西比河下游和东部林地的周边地区是真的。31它仍将是相当了不起的。因为,除非我们处理的是某种惊人的宇宙巧合,否则这意味着有人必须在非常长的距离内传递关于精确空间测量的几何和数学技术知识,以及相关的劳动组织形式。如果是这样的话,他们似乎也有可能分享其他形式的知识:宇宙学、地质学、哲学、医学、伦理学、动物群、植物群、关于财产的想法、社会结构和美学。
In the case of Poverty Point, should this be conceived as a form of exchange of knowledge for material goods? Possibly. But the movement of objects and ideas might have been organized any number of other ways as well. All we know for sure is that the lack of an agricultural base does not seem to have stopped those who gathered on Poverty Point from creating something that to us would appear very much like little cities which, at least during certain times of year, hosted a rich and influential intellectual life.
就 “贫困点” 而言,这应该被视为一种以知识换取物质产品的形式?有可能。但物品和思想的流动也可能是以任何其他方式组织的。我们可以肯定的是,缺乏农业基础似乎并没有阻止那些聚集在贫困点的人创造一些对我们来说非常像小城市的东西,至少在一年中的某些时候,这些小城市承载着丰富而有影响力的知识生活。
Today, Poverty Point is a National Park and Monument and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Despite these designations of international importance, its implications for world history have hardly begun to be explored. A hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state, Poverty Point makes the Anatolian complex of Göbekli Tepe look like little more than a ‘potbelly hill’ (which is, in fact, what ‘Göbekli Tepe’ means in Turkish). Yet outside a small community of academic specialists, and of course local residents and visitors, very few people have heard of it.
今天,贫困点是一个国家公园和纪念碑,也是联合国教科文组织的世界遗产地。尽管这些指定的国际重要性,它对世界历史的影响几乎没有开始被探索。作为一个美索不达米亚城邦大小的狩猎采集者大都市,贫困点让安纳托利亚的 Göbekli Tepe 建筑群看起来不过是一座 “大肚子山”(事实上,这就是 Göbekli Tepe 在土耳其语中的意思)。然而,除了一小群学术专家,当然还有当地居民和游客,很少有人听说过它。
The obvious question at this juncture must surely be: why isn’t Poverty Point better known to audiences the world over? Why doesn’t it feature more prominently (or at all) in discussions on the origins of urban life, centralization and their consequences for human history?
在这个时候,一个明显的问题肯定是:为什么贫困点没有被全世界的观众更好地了解?为什么在关于城市生活的起源、中央集权及其对人类历史的影响的讨论中,它没有占据更突出的位置(或根本没有)?
One reason, no doubt, is that Poverty Point and its predecessors (like the much older mound complex at Watson’s Brake, in the nearby Ouachita basin) have been placed in a phase of American prehistory known as the ‘Archaic’. The Archaic period covers an immense span of time, between the flooding of the Beringia land bridge (which once linked Eurasia to the Americas) around 8000 BC, and the initial adoption and spread of maize-farming in certain parts of North America, down to around 1000 BC . One word, for seven millennia of indigenous history. Archaeologists who first gave the period its name – which is really more of a chronological slap in the face – were basically declaring, ‘this is the period before anything particularly important was happening.’ So when undeniable evidence began to appear that all sorts of important things were indeed happening, and not just in the Mississippi basin, it was almost something of an archaeological embarrassment.
毫无疑问,原因之一是贫困点和它的前身(如附近瓦奇塔盆地的沃森布瑞克更古老的土丘群)被置于美洲史前史的一个阶段,即 “古世纪”。古代时期涵盖了一个巨大的时间跨度,从公元前 8000 年左右白令谷陆桥(曾经连接欧亚大陆和美洲)被淹没,到北美某些地区最初采用和传播玉米种植,一直到公元前 1000 年左右。一个词,代表了七千年的本土历史。最初给这个时期命名的考古学家 —— 这实际上更像是在打脸 —— 基本上是在宣称,“这是发生任何特别重要的事情之前的时期。” 因此,当不可否认的证据开始出现,表明各种重要的事情确实在发生,而且不仅仅是在密西西比河流域,这几乎是一种考古学上的尴尬。
On the shores of the Atlantic and around the Gulf of Mexico lie enigmatic structures: just as remarkable as Poverty Point, but even less well known. Formed out of shell in great accumulations, they range from small rings to massive U-shaped ‘amphitheatres’ like those of St Johns River valley in Northeast Florida. These were no natural features. They too were built spaces where hunter-gatherer publics once assembled in their thousands. Far to the north and west, on the other side of the continent, more surprises loom up from the windswept shores of British Columbia: settlements and fortifications of striking magnitude, dating back as far as 2000 BC, facing a Pacific already familiar with the spectacle of war and long-range commerce.32
在大西洋海岸和墨西哥湾周围,有一些神秘的结构:和贫困点一样引人注目,但甚至不为人所知。它们由贝壳大量堆积而成,范围从小型环形到巨大的 U 形 “圆形剧场”,如佛罗里达州东北部的圣约翰河谷。这些都不是自然特征。它们也都是建成的空间,狩猎采集者曾经在这里聚集了成千上万的人。在大陆另一端的北部和西部,不列颠哥伦比亚省风吹日晒的海岸上出现了更多的惊喜:规模惊人的定居点和防御工事,最早可追溯到公元前 2000 年,面对的是已经熟悉战争和远程商业景象的太平洋。32
On the matter of hunter-gatherer history, North America isn’t the only part of the world where evolutionary expectations are heading for a titanic collision with the archaeological record. In Japan and neighbouring islands, another monolithic cultural designation – ‘Jōmon’ – holds sway over more than 10,000 years of forager history, from around 14,000 BC to 300 BC . Japanese archaeologists spend much time subdividing the Jōmon period in ways just as intricate as the more pioneering North American scholars now do with their ‘Archaic’. Everyone else, however, whether museumgoers or readers of high-school textbooks, is still confronted with the stark singularity of the term ‘Jōmon’, which, covering the long ages before rice-farming came to Japan, leaves us with an impression of drab conservatism, a time when nothing really happened. New archaeological discoveries are now revealing just how wrong this is.
在狩猎·采集者的历史问题上,北美并不是世界上唯一一个进化期望与考古记录发生巨大碰撞的地区。在日本和邻近的岛屿,另一个单一的文化名称 —— 绳文(Jōmon) —— 支配着从公元前 14000 年到公元前 300 年的一万多年的狩猎历史。日本的考古学家花了很多时间来细分绳文时期,其方式就像现在北美学者对他们的 “Archaic” 所做的那样错综复杂。然而,其他所有人,无论是博物馆的观众还是高中教科书的读者,都仍然面临着 “绳文” 这个术语的明显的单一性,它涵盖了稻米耕作传入日本之前的漫长岁月,给我们留下了单调保守的印象,一个没有真正发生任何事情的时代。现在,新的考古发现揭示了这是多么错误。
The creation of a new Japanese national past is a somewhat paradoxical side effect of modernization. Since Japan’s economic take-off in the 1960s, many thousands of archaeological sites have been discovered, excavated and meticulously recorded, either as a result of construction projects for roads, railways, housing or nuclear plants or as part of immense rescue efforts undertaken in the wake of environmental catastrophes such as the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. The result is an immense archive of archaeological information. What begins to emerge from this data-labyrinth is an entirely different picture of what society was like before irrigated rice cultivation came to Japan from the Korean Peninsula.
创造一个新的日本民族历史是现代化的一个有点矛盾的副作用。自 20 世纪 60 年代日本经济起飞以来,数以千计的考古遗址被发现、挖掘和精心记录,这要么是公路、铁路、住房或核电站建设项目的结果,要么是在 2011 年东北地震等环境灾难发生后进行的巨大救援工作的一部分。其结果是一个巨大的考古学信息档案。从这个数据迷宫中开始出现的是一幅完全不同的画面,即在灌溉水稻种植从朝鲜半岛传到日本之前,社会是什么样子。
Across the Japanese archipelago, between 14,000 and 300 BC, centennial cycles of settlement nucleation and dispersal came and went; monuments shot up in wood and stone, and then were pulled down again or abandoned; elaborate ritual traditions, including opulent burials, flourished and declined; specialized crafts waxed and waned, including remarkable accomplishments in the arts of pottery, wood and lacquer. In traditions of wild food procurement, strong regional contrasts are evident, ranging from maritime adaptations to acorn-based economies, both using large storage facilities for gathered resources. Cannabis came into use, for fibres and recreational drug use. There were enormous villages with grand storehouses and what seem to be ritual precincts, such as those found at Sannai Maruyama.33
在整个日本群岛,从公元前 14000 年到公元前 300 年,定居者的成群结队和分散的百年周期来了又去;木头和石头的纪念碑拔地而起,然后又被拆除或遗弃;精心设计的仪式传统,包括华丽的葬礼,盛极而衰;专门的手工艺盛极而衰,包括陶器、木材和漆器艺术方面的显著成就。在采购野生食物的传统中,强烈的地区对比是显而易见的,从海洋适应性到基于橡子的经济,两者都使用大型储存设施来收集资源。大麻开始被使用,用于纤维和娱乐性药物的使用。这里有巨大的村庄,有宏伟的仓库和似乎是仪式的场所,例如在三井丸山发现的那些。33
An entire, forgotten social history of pre-agricultural Japan is resurfacing, for now largely as a mass of data points and state heritage archives. In future, as the bits get pieced back together, who knows what will come into view?
整个被遗忘的日本前农业时代的社会历史正在重新浮现,目前主要是作为大量的数据点和国家遗产档案。在未来,随着这些碎片被重新拼凑起来,谁知道会出现什么呢?
Europe, too, bears witness to the vibrant and complex history of non-agricultural peoples after the Ice Age. Take the monuments called in Finnish Jätinkirkko, the ‘Giants’ Churches’ of the Bothnian Sea between Sweden and Finland: great stone ramparts, some up to 195 feet long, raised up in their tens by coastal foragers between 3000 and 2000 BC . Or the ‘Big Idol’, a seventeen-foot-tall totem pole with elaborate carvings rescued from a peat bog on the shores of Lake Shigirskoe, on the eastern slopes of the Central Urals. Dating to around 8000 BC, the Idol is the lone survivor of a long-lost tradition of large-scale wooden forager art which once produced monuments that presided over northern skies. Then come the amber-soaked burials of Karelia and southern Scandinavia, with their elaborate grave goods and corpses staged in expressive poses, echoing some forgotten etiquette of Mesolithic vintage.34 And, as we’ve seen, even the major building phases of Stonehenge, long associated with early farmers, are now dated to a time when cereal cultivation was virtually abandoned and hazelnut-gathering once again took over in the British Isles, alongside livestock-herding.
欧洲也见证了冰河时代后非农业民族充满活力的复杂历史。以芬兰语中称为 Jätinkirkko 的纪念碑为例,它是瑞典和芬兰之间博特尼亚海的 “巨人教堂”:巨大的石墙,有些长达 195 英尺,是由沿海的觅食者在公元前 3000 年至 2000 年之间竖起的数十座石墙。还有 “大偶像”,一个 17 英尺高的图腾柱,上面有精心雕刻的图案,是在中乌拉尔山脉东坡的希吉尔斯科湖岸边的泥炭沼泽中被救出来的。偶像的历史可以追溯到公元前 8000 年左右,它是失传已久的大型木质觅食者艺术传统的唯一幸存者,该传统曾经产生了主持北方天空的纪念碑。然后是卡累利阿和斯堪的纳维亚南部的琥珀浸泡的墓葬,其精心制作的墓具和尸体摆出的表情,呼应了中石器时代的一些被遗忘的礼仪。34而且,正如我们所看到的,即使是长期以来与早期农民有关的巨石阵的主要建筑阶段,现在也可以追溯到谷物种植几乎被放弃,榛子采集再次在不列颠群岛与牲畜放牧一起被接管的时代。
Back in North America, some researchers are beginning to talk, a little awkwardly, of the ‘New Archaic’, a hitherto unsuspected era of ‘monuments without kings’.35 But the truth is that we still know precious little of the political systems lying behind a now almost globally attested phenomenon of forager monumentality, or indeed whether some of those monumental projects might have involved kings or other kinds of leaders. What we do know is that this changes forever the nature of the conversation about social evolution in the Americas, Japan, Europe, and no doubt most other places too. Clearly, foragers didn’t shuffle backstage at the close of the last Ice Age, waiting in the wings for some group of Neolithic farmers to reopen the theatre of history. Why, then, is this new knowledge so rarely integrated into our accounts of the human past? Why does almost everyone (everyone, at least, who is not a specialist on Archaic North America or Jōmon Japan) still write as if such things were impossible before the coming of agriculture?
在北美,一些研究人员开始有点尴尬地谈论 “新古时代”,一个迄今未被发现的 “没有国王的纪念碑” 的时代。35但事实是,我们对现在几乎在全球范围内得到证实的觅食者纪念碑现象背后的政治制度仍然知之甚少,或者说,这些纪念碑项目中是否有国王或其他类型的领导人参与。我们所知道的是,这永远改变了关于美洲、日本、欧洲以及毫无疑问大多数其他地方的社会进化的对话的性质。显然,觅食者并没有在最后一个冰河时代结束时在后台洗牌,等待一些新石器时代的农民重新开启历史的舞台。那么,为什么这些新知识很少被纳入我们对人类历史的描述中呢?为什么几乎每一个人(至少是每一个不是研究北美古人类或日本绳文的专家的人)都还在写,好像在农业到来之前这些事情是不可能的?
Of course, those of us with no access to archaeological reports can be excused. What information exists more widely tends to be restricted to scattered, and sometimes sensationalized, news summaries that are very hard to put together into a single picture. Scholars and professional researchers, on the other hand, have to actually make a considerable effort to remain so ignorant. Let us consider for a moment some of the peculiar forms of intellectual acrobatics required.
当然,我们这些没有机会看到考古报告的人可以原谅。更广泛存在的信息往往局限于零散的,有时是耸人听闻的新闻摘要,很难拼凑成一张图片。另一方面,学者和专业研究人员实际上必须做出相当大的努力才能保持这种无知。让我们暂时考虑一下所需的一些特殊形式的智力杂技。
Let’s first ask why even some experts apparently find it so difficult to shake off the idea of the carefree, idle forager band; and the twin assumption that ‘civilization’ properly so called – towns, specialized craftspeople, specialists in esoteric knowledge – would be impossible without agriculture. Why would anyone continue to write history as if places like Poverty Point could never have existed? It can’t just be the whimsical result of airy academic terminologies (‘Archaic’, ‘Jōmon’ and so on). The real answer, we suggest, has more to do with the legacy of European colonial expansion; and in particular its impact on both indigenous and European systems of thought, especially with regard to the expression of rights of property in land.
让我们首先问一下,为什么连一些专家都明显发现很难摆脱无忧无虑、无所事事的觅食者队伍的想法;以及没有农业就不可能有所谓的 “文明” —— 城镇、专业工匠、深奥知识的专家 —— 的双重假设。为什么会有人继续写历史,好像像贫困点这样的地方永远不可能存在?这不可能只是空洞的学术术语(“古”、“Jōmon” 等)的异想天开。我们认为,真正的答案与欧洲殖民扩张的遗产有关;特别是它对本土和欧洲思想体系的影响,尤其是在土地产权的表达方面。
Recall how – long before Sahlins’s notion of the ‘original affluent society’ – indigenous critics of European civilization were already arguing that hunter-gatherers were really better off than other people because they could obtain the things they wanted and needed so easily. Such views can be found as early as the sixteenth century – remember, for instance, the Mi’kmaq interlocutors who annoyed Père Biard so much by insisting they were richer than the French, for exactly that reason. Kandiaronk made similar arguments, insisting ‘the Savages of Canada, notwithstanding their Poverty, are richer than you, among whom all sorts of crimes are committed upon the score of Mine and Thine.’36
回顾一下 —— 早在萨林斯的 “原始富裕社会” 的概念之前 —— 欧洲文明的本土批评者已经在争论,狩猎采集者确实比其他人更富裕,因为他们可以很容易地获得他们想要和需要的东西。这种观点早在十六世纪就可以找到 —— 例如,记得米克马克的对话者,他们坚持认为他们比法国人更富有,正是因为这个原因,他们才会如此恼火。坎迪阿伦克也提出了类似的论点,坚持认为 “加拿大的野蛮人,尽管他们很穷,但比你们更富有,在他们中间,各种罪行都是以我的和你的为标准。36
As we’ve seen, indigenous critics like Kandiaronk, caught in the rhetorical moment, would frequently overstate their case, even playing along with the idea that they were blissful, innocent children of nature. They did this in order to expose what they considered the bizarre perversions of the European lifestyle. The irony is that, in doing so, they often played into the hands of those who argued that – being blissful and innocent children of nature – they also had no natural rights to their land.
正如我们所看到的,像坎迪阿伦克这样的原住民批评家,在修辞的时刻,会经常夸大他们的情况,甚至玩弄他们是幸福的、无辜的自然之子的想法。他们这样做是为了揭露他们所认为的欧洲生活方式的怪异变态。具有讽刺意味的是,在这样做的过程中,他们常常被那些认为 —— 作为自然界的幸福和无辜的孩子 —— 他们对自己的土地也没有自然权利的人所利用。
Here it’s important to understand a little of the legal basis for dispossessing people who had the misfortune already to be living in territories coveted by European settlers. This was, almost invariably, what nineteenth-century jurists came to call the ‘Agricultural Argument’, a principle which has played a major role in the displacement of untold thousands of indigenous peoples from ancestral lands in Australia, New Zealand, sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas: processes typically accompanied by the rape, torture and mass murder of human beings, and often the destruction of entire civilizations.
在这里,有必要了解一下剥夺那些不幸生活在欧洲定居者觊觎的领土上的人们的法律依据。这几乎无一例外地是十九世纪的法学家所称的 “农业论点”,这一原则在澳大利亚、新西兰、撒哈拉以南非洲和美洲数以千计的原住民被赶出祖先的土地中发挥了重要作用:这一过程通常伴随着对人类的强奸、酷刑和大规模谋杀,而且往往是对整个文明的破坏。
Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature – which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it. The entire basis for dispossession, in turn, was premised on the idea that the current inhabitants of those lands weren’t really working. The argument goes back to John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argued that property rights are necessarily derived from labour. In working the land, one ‘mixes one’s labour’ with it; in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself. Lazy natives, according to Locke’s disciples, didn’t do that. They were not, Lockeans claimed, ‘improving landlords’ but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum of effort. James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and ‘if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or “destroyed” like savage beasts.’37 In a similar way, the stereotype of the carefree, lazy native, coasting through a life free from material ambition, was deployed by thousands of European conquerors, plantation overseers and colonial officials in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania as a pretext for the use of bureaucratic terror to force local people into work: everything from outright enslavement to punitive tax regimes, corvée labour and debt peonage.
殖民者对原住民土地的侵占往往始于某种笼统的断言,即觅食者确实生活在自然状态中 —— 这意味着他们被认为是土地的一部分,但在法律上没有拥有土地的权利。反过来,剥夺土地的整个基础是以这些土地的现有居民没有真正的工作为前提的。这一论点可以追溯到约翰·洛克的《政府第二论》(1690 年),他在其中认为,产权必然来自劳动。在耕种土地时,人们将自己的劳动与土地 “混合” 在一起;在某种意义上,土地成为自己的延伸。洛克的弟子认为,懒惰的当地人并没有这样做。洛克主义者声称,他们不是 “改良的地主”,而只是利用土地,以最小的努力满足他们的基本需求。原住民权利的权威詹姆斯·塔利阐述了历史影响:用于狩猎和采集的土地被认为是空置的,“如果原住民试图让欧洲人遵守他们的法律和习俗,或者捍卫他们几千年来错误地认为是自己财产的领土,那么违反自然法的是他们,可能会像野蛮的野兽一样受到惩罚或被 ‘毁灭’。”37同样,无忧无虑、懒惰的本地人,在没有物质野心的生活中游刃有余的刻板印象,被亚洲、非洲、拉丁美洲和大洋洲成千上万的欧洲征服者、种植园监督者和殖民官员用来作为使用官僚恐怖手段迫使当地人工作的借口:从直接奴役到惩罚性税收制度、徭役和债务奴役。
As indigenous legal scholars have been pointing out for years, the ‘Agricultural Argument’ makes no sense, even on its own terms. There are many ways, other than European-style farming, in which to care for and improve the productivity of land. What to a settler’s eye seemed savage, untouched wilderness usually turns out to be landscapes actively managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years through controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, fertilizing and pruning, terracing estuarine plots to extend the habitat of particular wild flora, building clam gardens in intertidal zones to enhance the reproduction of shellfish, creating weirs to catch salmon, bass and sturgeon, and so on. Such procedures were often labour-intensive, and regulated by indigenous laws governing who could access groves, swamps, root beds, grasslands and fishing grounds, and who was entitled to exploit what species at any given time of year. In parts of Australia, these indigenous techniques of land management were such that, according to one recent study, we should stop speaking of ‘foraging’ altogether, and refer instead to a different sort of farming.38
正如本土法律学者多年来一直指出的那样,“农业论证” 即使就其本身而言也是毫无意义的。除了欧洲式的耕作之外,还有很多方法可以照顾和提高土地的生产力。在定居者眼里似乎是野蛮的、无人问津的荒野,结果通常是原住民几千年来积极管理的地貌,通过控制燃烧、除草、砍树、施肥和修剪,在河口地块上修筑梯田以扩大特定野生植物的栖息地,在潮间带建造蛤蜊园以加强贝类的繁殖,建立堰塘以捕捉鲑鱼、鲈鱼和鲟鱼,等等。这些程序往往是劳动密集型的,并由土著法律规定谁可以进入小树林、沼泽地、根床、草原和渔场,以及谁有权在一年中的任何特定时间开发什么物种。在澳大利亚部分地区,这些本土的土地管理技术,根据最近的一项研究,我们应该完全停止谈论 “觅食”,而是指一种不同的耕作方式。38
Such societies might not have recognized private property rights in the same sense as Roman Law or English Common Law, but it’s absurd to argue they had no property rights at all. They simply had different conceptions of property. This is true, incidentally, even of people like the Hadza or!Kung; and, as we will see, many other foraging peoples actually had extraordinarily complex and sophisticated conceptions of ownership. Sometimes these indigenous property systems formed the basis for differential access to resources, with the result that something like social classes emerged.39 Usually, though, this did not happen, because people made sure that it didn’t, much as they made sure chiefs did not develop coercive power.
这样的社会可能不承认与罗马法或英国普通法相同意义上的私有产权,但如果说他们根本没有产权,那是荒谬的。他们只是对财产有不同的概念。顺便说一下,即使像哈德萨人或!孔人也是如此;而且,正如我们将看到的,许多其他觅食民族实际上有非常复杂和精密的所有权概念。有时,这些本土的财产制度构成了不同的资源使用权的基础,其结果是出现了类似社会阶层的东西。39但通常情况下,这种情况不会发生,因为人们确保它不会发生,就像他们确保酋长不会形成强制力一样。
We should nonetheless recognize that the economic base of at least some foraging societies was capable of supporting anything from priestly castes to royal courts with standing armies. Let us take just one dramatic example to illustrate the point.
然而,我们应该认识到,至少一些觅食社会的经济基础能够支持从祭司阶层到拥有常备军的皇家法庭的任何东西。让我们仅举一个戏剧性的例子来说明这一点。
One of the first North American societies described by European explorers in the sixteenth century were the Calusa, a non-agricultural people who inhabited the west coast of Florida, from Tampa Bay to the Keys. There they had established a small kingdom, ruled from a capital town called Calos, which today is marked by a thirty-hectare complex of high shell mounds known as Mound Key. Fish, shellfish and larger marine animals comprised a major part of the Calusa diet, supplemented by deer, raccoon and a variety of birds. Calusa also maintained a fleet of war canoes with which they would launch military raids on nearby populations, extracting processed foods, skins, weapons, amber, metals and slaves as tribute. When Juan Ponce de León entered Charlotte Harbor on 4 June 1513 he was met by a well-organized flotilla of such canoes, manned by heavily armed hunter-gatherers.
欧洲探险家在十六世纪描述的第一批北美社会之一是卡鲁萨人,他们是居住在佛罗里达州西海岸,从坦帕湾到群岛的非农业民族。他们在那里建立了一个小王国,由一个叫卡洛斯的首府统治,今天这里有一个占地 30 公顷的,由高大的贝壳丘组成,被称为丘基。鱼、贝类和较大的海洋动物是卡鲁萨人饮食的主要部分,此外还有鹿、浣熊和各种鸟类。卡鲁萨人还保持着一支战争独木舟舰队,他们用这些独木舟对附近的居民发动军事袭击,提取加工食品、皮毛、武器、琥珀、金属和奴隶作为贡品。1513 年 6 月 4 日,当胡安·庞塞·德·莱昂进入夏洛特港时,他遇到了一支组织严密的独木舟船队,由全副武装的狩猎采集者操纵。
Some historians resist calling the Calusa leader a ‘king’, preferring terms like ‘paramount chief’, but first-hand accounts leave no doubt about his exalted status. The man known as ‘Carlos’, the ruler of Calos at the time of initial European contact, even looked like a European king: he wore a gold diadem and beaded leg bands and sat on a wooden throne – and, crucially, he was the only Calusa allowed to do so. His powers seemed absolute. ‘His will was law, and insubordination was punishable by death.’40 He was also responsible for performing secret rituals that ensured the renewal of nature. His subjects always greeted him by kneeling and raising their hands in a gesture of obeisance, and he was typically accompanied by representatives of the ruling class of warrior nobles and priests who, like him, devoted themselves largely to the business of government. And he had at his disposal the services of specialized craftsmen, including court metallurgists who worked silver, gold and copper.
一些历史学家不愿意称卡卢萨领导人为 “国王”,他们更喜欢用 “最高酋长” 这样的术语,但第一手资料显示,他的地位之高是毋庸置疑的。被称为 “卡洛斯” 的人,在最初与欧洲人接触时是卡卢萨的统治者,他甚至看起来像一个欧洲国王:他戴着金质头饰和珠子腿带,坐在木质王座上 —— 而且,关键是,他是唯一被允许这样做的卡卢萨人。他的权力似乎是绝对的。他的意志就是法律,不服从命令的人将被处以死刑。40他还负责举行秘密仪式,确保自然界的更新。他的臣民在迎接他的时候总是跪下来,举起手来表示敬意,他的身边通常有武士贵族和牧师组成的统治阶级的代表,他们和他一样,主要致力于政府的事务。他还拥有专业工匠的服务,包括加工银、金和铜的宫廷冶金师。
Spanish observers reported a traditional practice: that on the death of a Calusa ruler, or of his principal wife, a certain quota of their subjects’ sons and daughters had to be put to death. By most definitions, all this would make Carlos not just a king, but a sacred king, perhaps divine.41 We know less about the economic basis for these arrangements, but court life appears to have been made possible not only by complex systems of access to coastal fishing grounds, which were exceedingly rich, but also by canals and artificial ponds dug out of the coastal everglades. The latter, in turn, allowed for permanent – that is, non-seasonal – settlements (though most Calusa did still scatter to fishing and gathering sites at certain times of year, when the big towns grew decidedly smaller).42
西班牙观察员报告了一个传统做法:卡鲁萨统治者或其主要妻子死亡时,其臣民的儿子和女儿必须有一定的配额被处死。根据大多数定义,所有这些将使卡洛斯不仅是一个国王,而且是一个神圣的国王,也许是圣洁的。41我们对这些安排的经济基础知之甚少,但宫廷生活似乎不仅通过复杂的沿海渔场准入系统得以实现,这些渔场非常丰富,而且还通过从沿海沼泽地挖出的运河和人工池塘来实现。后者又允许永久 —— 即非季节性 —— 定居(尽管大多数卡鲁萨人在一年中的某些时候仍然分散到捕鱼和采集地点,这时大城镇明显变小)。42
By all accounts, then, the Calusa had indeed ‘got stuck’ in a single economic and political mode that allowed extreme forms of inequality to emerge. But they did so without ever planting a single seed or tethering a single animal. Confronted with such cases, adherents of the view that agriculture was a necessary foundation for durable inequalities have two options: ignore them, or claim they represent some kind of insignificant anomaly. Surely, they will say, foragers who do these kinds of things – raiding their neighbours, stockpiling wealth, creating elaborate court ceremonial, defending their territories and so on – aren’t really foragers at all, or at least not true foragers. Surely they must be farmers by other means, effectively practising agriculture (just with wild crops), or perhaps somehow caught in a moment of transition, ‘on the way’ to becoming farmers, just not yet having quite arrived?
从各方面来看,卡鲁萨人确实 “困在” 一个单一的经济和政治模式中,使极端形式的不平等得以出现。但他们在这样做的时候,并没有种下一粒种子或拴住一只动物。面对这样的案例,认为农业是持久不平等的必要基础的观点的追随者有两个选择:忽视它们,或者声称它们代表某种无足轻重的反常现象。当然,他们会说,做这些事情的觅食者 —— 突袭邻居、储存财富、创造精致的宫廷仪式、保卫领土等等 —— 根本就不是真正的觅食者,或者至少不是真正的觅食者。当然,他们必须通过其他方式成为农民,有效地从事农业(只是使用野生作物),或者也许在某种程度上处于过渡时期,“正在成为农民的路上”,只是还没有完全到达?
All these are excellent examples of what Antony Flew called the ‘No True Scotsman’ style of argument (also known to logicians as the ‘ad hoc rescue’ procedure). For those unfamiliar with it, it works like this:
所有这些都是安东尼·弗莱所说的 “没有真正的苏格兰人” 的论证方式(也被逻辑学家称为 “特别救援” 程序)的绝佳例子。对于那些不熟悉它的人来说,它是这样工作的。
Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the ‘Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again’. Hamish is shocked and declares that ‘No Scotsman would do such a thing.’ The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion, but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says: ‘No true Scotsman would do such a thing.’43
想象一下,苏格兰人哈米什·麦克唐纳坐着下来,手里拿着《格拉斯哥晨报》,看到一篇关于 “布莱顿性爱狂人再次出击” 的文章。哈米什很震惊,并宣称 “没有一个苏格兰人会做这样的事情”。第二天,他又坐下来阅读《格拉斯哥先驱晨报》;这一次,他发现了一篇关于一个阿伯丁人的文章,他的残暴行为使布莱顿的性爱狂人看起来几乎很有绅士风度。这一事实表明,哈米什的看法是错误的,但他会承认这一点吗?不可能。这一次他说:“没有一个真正的苏格兰人会做这样的事情。43
Philosophers frown on this style of argumentation as a classic ‘informal fallacy’, or variety of circular argument. You simply assert a proposition (e.g. ‘hunter-gatherers do not have aristocracies’), then protect it from any possible counter-examples by continually changing the definition. We prefer a consistent approach.
哲学家们认为这种论证方式是典型的 “非正式谬误”,或各种循环论证。你只是简单地断言一个命题(例如 “狩猎采集者没有贵族制度”),然后通过不断地改变定义来保护它不受任何可能的反例影响。我们更喜欢一致的方法。
Foragers are populations which don’t rely on biologically domesticated plants and animals as their primary sources of food. Therefore, if it becomes apparent that a good number of them have in fact possessed complex systems of land tenure, or worshipped kings, or practised slavery, this altered picture of their activities doesn’t somehow magically turn them into ‘proto-farmers’. Nor does it justify the invention of endless sub-categories like ‘complex’ or ‘affluent’ or ‘delayed-return’ hunter-gatherers, which is simply another way of ensuring such peoples are kept in what the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot called the ‘savage slot’, their histories defined and circumscribed by their mode of subsistence – as if they were people who really ought to be lazing around all day, but for some reason got ahead of themselves.44 Instead, it means that the initial assertion was, like that of the apocryphal Hamish McDonald, simply wrong.
觅食者是不依赖生物驯化的植物和动物作为其主要食物来源的人群。因此,如果他们中的很多人实际上拥有复杂的土地所有权制度,或崇拜国王,或,这种对他们活动的改变并不能神奇地将他们变成 “原农民”。它也不能成为发明 “复杂的” 或 “富裕的” 或 “延迟返回的” 狩猎采集者等无尽子类别的理由,这只是确保这些民族被保留在海地人类学家米歇尔·罗尔夫·特鲁伊洛所说的 “野蛮槽” 中的另一种方式,他们的历史被他们的生存方式所定义和限定 —— 就好像他们是真正应该整天闲逛的人,但由于某种原因却超越了自己。44相反,这意味着最初的断言就像启示录中的哈米什·麦克唐纳的断言一样,是完全错误的。
In academic thought, there’s another popular way of propping up the myth of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and thereby writing off people like the Calusa as evolutionary quirks or anomalies. This is to claim that they only behaved the way they did because they were living in ‘atypical’ environments. Usually, what’s meant by ‘atypical’ are wetlands of various sorts – coasts and river valleys – as opposed to the remoter corners of tropical forests or desert margins, which is assumed to be where hunter-gatherers really ought to be living, since that is where most of them live today. It is a particularly weird argument, but a lot of very serious people make it, so we’ll briefly have to take it on.
在学术界,还有一种流行的方法来支持 “农业革命” 的神话,从而把卡鲁萨人这样的人写成进化的怪癖或异常现象。这就是声称他们的行为方式只是因为他们生活在 “非典型” 环境中。通常,“非典型” 是指各种湿地 —— 海岸和河谷 —— 而不是热带森林或沙漠边缘的偏远角落,这被认为是狩猎采集者真正应该生活的地方,因为那是他们中大多数人今天生活的地方。这是一个特别奇怪的论点,但很多非常严肃的人都这么说,所以我们将简要地接受它。
Anyone who was still living mainly by hunting animals and gathering wild foodstuffs in the early to mid twentieth century was almost certainly living on land no one else particularly wanted. That’s why so many of the best descriptions of foragers come from places like the Kalahari Desert or Arctic Circle. Ten thousand years ago, this was obviously not the case. Everyone was a forager; overall population densities were low. Foragers were therefore free to live in pretty much any sort of territory they fancied. All things being equal, those living off wild resources would tend to cleave to places where they were abundant. You would think this is self-evident, but apparently it isn’t.
在 20 世纪初至中期,任何仍然主要靠猎杀动物和采集野生食物为生的人,几乎可以肯定是生活在别人并不特别想要的土地上。这就是为什么这么多关于觅食者的最佳描述来自卡拉哈里沙漠或北极圈等地方。一万年前,这个,显然不是这样的。每个人都是觅食者;总体人口密度很低。因此,觅食者可以自由地生活在他们喜欢的任何类型的地区。在所有条件相同的情况下,那些靠野生资源生活的人往往会聚集在资源丰富的地方。你会认为这是不言而喻的,但显然这不是。
Those who today describe people like the Calusa as ‘atypical’ because they had such a prosperous resource base want us to believe, instead, that ancient foragers chose to avoid locations of this kind, shunning the rivers and coasts (which also offered natural arteries for movement and communication), because they were so keen to oblige later researchers by resembling twentieth-century hunter-gatherers (the sort for which detailed scientific data is available today). We are asked to believe that it was only after they ran out of deserts and mountains and rainforests that they reluctantly started to colonize richer and more comfortable environments. We might call this the ‘all the bad spots are taken!’ argument.
那些今天把像卡卢萨人这样的人描述为 “非典型” 的人,因为他们有如此繁荣的资源基础,反而要我们相信,古代的觅食者选择避开这种地方,避开河流和海岸(这也提供了移动和交流的自然动脉),因为他们非常希望通过类似于二十世纪的狩猎采集者(今天有详细科学数据的那种)来满足后来研究者的要求。我们被要求相信,只是在他们用完了沙漠、山脉和雨林之后,他们才不情愿地开始殖民更丰富和更舒适的环境。我们可以把这称为 “所有不好的地方都被占领了!” 的说法。
In fact, there was nothing atypical about the Calusa. They were just one of many fisher-forager populations living around the Straits of Florida – including the Tequesta, Pojoy, Jeaga, Jobe and Ais (some apparently ruled by dynasties of their own) – with whom Calusa conducted regular trade, fought wars and arranged dynastic marriages. They were also among the first Native American societies to be destroyed since, for obvious reasons, coasts and estuaries were the first spots where Spanish colonizers landed, bringing epidemic diseases, priests, tribute and, eventually, settlers. This was a pattern repeated on every continent, from America to Oceania, where invariably the most attractive ports, harbours, fisheries and surrounding lands were first snapped up by British, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch or Russian settlers, who also drained tidal salt marshes and coastal lagoons to farm cereals and cash crops.45
事实上,卡卢萨人并没有什么非典型性。他们只是生活在佛罗里达海峡周围的众多渔民群体之一,包括特克斯塔人、波乔伊人、杰加人、乔布人和艾斯人(有些人显然有自己的王朝统治),卡鲁萨人与他们进行定期贸易,打仗和安排王朝的婚姻。他们也是最早被摧毁的美洲原住民社会之一,因为出于明显的原因,海岸和河口是西班牙殖民者最先登陆的地方,他们带来了流行病、牧师、贡品和最终的定居者。这种模式在从美洲到大洋洲的每个大陆上都在重复,在那里,最有吸引力的港口、海港、渔场和周围的土地首先被英国、法国、葡萄牙、西班牙、荷兰或俄罗斯的定居者抢走,他们还抽干潮汐盐沼和沿海泻湖的水来种植谷物和经济作物。45
Such was the fate of the Calusa and their ancient fishing and hunting grounds. When Florida was ceded to the British in the mid eighteenth century, the last handful of surviving subjects from the kingdom of Calos were shipped off to the Caribbean by their Spanish masters.
这就是卡卢萨人和他们古老的渔猎地的命运。当佛罗里达州在十八世纪中期被割让给英国时,卡卢萨王国最后几位幸存的臣民被他们的西班牙主人运到了加勒比海。
For most of human history, fishers, hunters and foragers did not have to contend with expansive empires; therefore, they themselves tended to be the most active human colonizers of aquatic environments. Archaeological evidence increasingly bears this out. It was long thought, for instance, that the Americas were first settled by humans travelling mainly over land (the so-called ‘Clovis people’). Around 13,000 years ago they were supposed to have followed an arduous crossing from Beringia, the land bridge between Russia and Alaska, passing south between terrestrial glaciers, over frozen mountains – all because, for some reason, it never occurred to any of them to build a boat and follow the coast.
在人类历史的大部分时间里,渔民、猎人和觅食者不必与庞大的帝国抗衡;因此,他们自己往往是水生环境中最活跃的人类殖民者。考古学证据越来越证明了这一点。例如,长期以来,人们认为美洲是由主要在陆地上旅行的人类(所谓的 “克洛维斯人”)首次定居。大约 1.3 万年前,他们被认为是从俄罗斯和阿拉斯加之间的陆桥白令牙出发,在陆地冰川之间向南经过,越过冰冻的山脉 —— 所有这些都是因为,出于某种原因,他们中没有人想到要造一艘船,沿着海岸走。
More recent evidence suggests a very different picture (or, as one Navajo informant put it when faced with an archaeological map of the terrestrial route via Beringia: ‘maybe some other guys came over like that, but us Navajos came a different way’).46
最近的证据表明了一个非常不同的情况(或者,正如一位纳瓦霍人的信息提供者在面对经过白令海峡的陆地路线的考古地图时所说:“也许其他一些人是这样过来的,但我们纳瓦霍人是走另一条路的”)。46
In fact, Eurasian populations made a much earlier entry to what was then a genuinely ‘New World’, some 17,000 years ago. What was more, they did indeed think to build boats, following a coastal route that passed around the Pacific Rim, hopping between offshore islands and linear patches of kelp forest and ending somewhere on the southern coast of Chile. Early eastward crossings also took place.47 Of course, it’s possible that these first Americans, on arriving in such rich coastal habitats, quickly abandoned them, preferring for some obscure reason to spend the rest of their lives climbing mountains, hacking their way through forests and trekking across endless monotonous prairies. But it seems more plausible to assume that the bulk of them stayed exactly where they were, often forming dense and stable settlements in such locations.
事实上,欧亚人更早地进入了当时真正的 “新世界”,距今约 17000 年。更重要的是,他们确实想到了造船,沿着一条沿海路线,绕过环太平洋地区,在近海岛屿和成片的海带森林之间跳跃,最后到达智利南部海岸的某个地方。早期的东渡也发生过。47当然,有可能这些第一批美洲人在到达如此丰富的沿海栖息地后,很快就放弃了这些栖息地,出于某种隐晦的原因,他们更愿意用余生去爬山,砍伐森林,在无尽的单调的草原上跋涉。但似乎更有可能的是,他们中的大部分人完全呆在原地,经常在这些地方形成密集和稳定的定居点。
The problem is, until recently this has always been an argument from silence, since rising sea levels long ago submerged the earliest records of shoreline habitation in most parts of the world. Archaeologists have tended to resist the conclusion that such habitations must have existed despite the lack of physical remains; but, with advances in the investigation of underwater environments, the case is growing stronger. A distinctly soggier (but also frankly more commonsensical) account of early human dispersal and settlement is finally becoming possible.48
问题是,直到最近,这一直是一个沉默的论点,因为海平面上升早已淹没了世界上大部分地区最早的海岸线居住记录。考古学家倾向于抵制这样的结论,即尽管缺乏物理遗迹,但这种居住地一定存在;但是,随着对水下环境调查的进展,这种情况越来越强烈。对早期人类的散布和定居,一个明显的、更有活力的(但也坦率地说是更符合常识的)说法终于成为可能。48
All this means that, of the many distinct cultural universes beginning to take shape across the world in the Early Holocene, most were likely centred on environments of abundance rather than scarcity: more like the Calusa’s than the!Kung’s. Does this also mean they were likely to have similar political arrangements to the Calusa? Here some caution is in order.
所有这些都意味着,在全新世早期开始在世界各地形成的许多独特的文化世界中,大多数可能是以丰富而不是匮乏的环境为中心的:更像卡鲁萨人,而不是孔氏人。这是否也意味着他们可能有与卡鲁萨人类似的政治安排?这里需要谨慎。
That the Calusa managed to maintain a sufficient economic surplus to support what looks to us like a miniature kingdom does not mean such an outcome is inevitable as soon as a society is capable of stockpiling a sufficient quantity of fish. After all, the Calusa were seafaring people; they would have undoubtedly been familiar with kingdoms ruled by divine monarchs like the Great Sun of the Natchez in nearby Louisiana and, likely as not, the empires of Central America. It’s possible they were simply imitating more powerful neighbours. Or maybe they were just odd. Finally, we don’t really know how much power even a divine king like Carlos really had. Here it’s useful to consider the Natchez themselves: an agricultural group, much better documented than the Calusa, and with a spectacular and purportedly absolute monarch of their own.
卡鲁萨人设法保持了足够的经济盈余,以支持在我们看来是一个微型王国,但这并不意味着只要一个社会有能力储存足够数量的鱼,这样的结果就是不可避免的。毕竟,卡鲁萨人是航海者;他们无疑熟悉由神圣的君主统治的王国,如附近路易斯安那州纳奇兹的大太阳,以及中美洲的帝国。有可能他们只是在模仿更强大的邻居。或者,他们只是很奇怪。最后,我们不知道像卡洛斯这样的神性国王到底有多少权力。在这里,考虑一下纳奇兹人本身是很有用的:他们是一个农业群体,比卡鲁萨人有更多的记载,而且有一个壮观的、据说是绝对的君主。
The Natchez Sun, as the monarch was known, inhabited a village in which he appeared to wield unlimited power. His every movement was greeted by elaborate rituals of deference, bowing and scraping; he could order arbitrary executions, help himself to any of his subjects’ possessions, do pretty much anything he liked. Still, this power was strictly limited by his own physical presence, which in turn was largely confined to the royal village itself. Most Natchez did not live in the royal village (indeed, most tended to avoid the place, for obvious reasons); outside it, royal representatives were treated no more seriously than Montagnais-Naskapi chiefs. If subjects weren’t inclined to obey these representatives’ orders, they simply laughed at them. In other words, while the court of the Natchez Sun was not pure empty theatre – those executed by the Great Sun were most definitely dead – neither was it the court of Suleiman the Magnificent or Aurangzeb. It seems to have been something almost precisely in between.
被称为 “纳奇兹太阳” 的君主居住在一个村庄里,他似乎拥有无限权力。他的一举一动都受到精心设计的恭敬、鞠躬和刮目相看的仪式的欢迎;他可以下令任意处决,帮助自己获得任何臣民的财产,做几乎任何他喜欢的事情。不过,这种权力还是受到他本人的实际存在的严格限制,而这种存在又在很大程度上局限于皇家村庄本身。大多数纳奇兹人并不住在王室村里(事实上,出于明显的原因,大多数人倾向于避开这个地方);在王室村外,王室代表受到的待遇并不比蒙塔格奈·纳斯卡皮族酋长更严肃。如果臣民不愿意服从这些代表的命令,他们只是嘲笑他们。换句话说,虽然纳奇兹太阳的宫廷不是纯粹的空荡档,被大太阳处决的人肯定是死了,但也不是苏莱曼大帝或奥朗泽布的宫廷。它似乎是一种几乎正好介于两者之间的东西。
Was Calusa kingship a similar arrangement? Spanish observers clearly didn’t think so (they regarded it as a more or less absolute monarchy), but since typically half the point of such deadly theatrics is to impress outsiders, that tells us very little in itself.49
卡鲁萨人的王权是类似的安排吗?西班牙观察员显然不这么认为(他们认为这是一个或多或少的绝对君主制),但由于通常这种致命的戏剧性的一半是为了给外人留下印象,这本身并不能告诉我们什么。49
What have we learned so far?
到目前为止,我们已经学到了什么?
Most obviously, that we can now put a final nail in the coffin of the prevailing view that human beings lived more or less like Kalahari Bushmen, until the invention of agriculture sent everything askew. Even were it possible to write off Pleistocene mammoth hunters as some kind of strange anomaly, the same clearly cannot be said for the period that immediately followed the glaciers’ retreat, when dozens of new societies began to form along resource-rich coasts, estuaries and river valleys, gathering in large and often permanent settlements, creating entirely new industries, building monuments according to mathematical principles, developing regional cuisines, and so on.
最明显的是,我们现在可以在主流观点的棺材上钉上最后一颗钉子,即在农业发明之前,人类或多或少地像卡拉哈里布什曼人一样生活,这使一切都变得不正常。即使有可能把更新世的猛犸象猎人当作某种奇怪的反常现象来注销,但对于紧随冰川退却之后的那段时期,显然也不能这么说,当时有几十个新的社会开始沿着资源丰富的海岸、河口和河谷形成,他们聚集在大型且通常是永久性的定居点,创造全新的产业,根据数学原理建造纪念碑,发展地区性的美食,等等。
We have also learned that at least some of these societies developed a material infrastructure capable of supporting royal courts and standing armies – even though we have, as yet, no clear evidence that they actually did so. To construct the earthworks at Poverty Point, for instance, must have taken enormous amounts of human labour and a strict regime of carefully planned-out work, but we still have little idea how that labour was organized. Japanese archaeologists, surveying thousands of years’ worth of Jōmon sites, have discovered all sorts of treasures, but they are yet to find indisputable evidence that those treasures were monopolized by any sort of aristocracy or ruling elite.
我们还了解到,这些社会中至少有一些发展了能够支持皇家法庭和常备军的物质基础设施 —— 尽管我们还没有明确的证据表明他们真的这样做了。例如,在贫困点建造土方工程,肯定需要大量的人力和精心策划的严格的工作制度,但我们仍然不知道这些劳动是如何组织的。日本考古学家在勘察了几千年的绳文遗址后,发现了各种各样的宝物,但他们还没有找到无可争议的证据,证明这些宝物被任何一种贵族或统治精英所垄断。
We cannot possibly know exactly which forms of ownership existed in these societies. What we can suggest, and there’s plenty of evidence to support it, is that all the places in question – Poverty Point, Sannai Maruyama, the Kastelli Giant’s Church in Finland, or indeed the earlier resting places of Upper Palaeolithic grandees – were in some sense sacred places. This might not seem like saying very much, but it’s important: it tells us a lot more about the ‘origins’ of private property than is generally assumed. In rounding off this discussion, we will try to explain why.
我们不可能确切知道在这些社会中存在哪种形式的所有权。我们可以说的是,而且有大量的证据支持,所有这些地方 —— 贫困点、Sannai Maruyama、芬兰的 Kastelli 巨人教堂,或者实际上是旧石器时代上部大人物的早期休息地 —— 在某种意义上是神圣的地方。这可能看起来说得不多,但它很重要:它告诉我们关于私有财产的 “起源”,比一般的假设多得多。在这次讨论的最后,我们将尝试解释原因。
Let’s turn again to the anthropologist James Woodburn, and a less well-known insight from his work on ‘immediate return’ hunter-gatherers. Even among those forager groups, famous for their assertive egalitarianism, he notes, there was one striking exception to the rule that no adult should ever presume to give direct orders to another, and that individuals should not lay private claim to property. This exception came in the sphere of ritual, of the sacred. In Hadza religion and the religions of many Pygmy groups, initiation into male (and sometimes female) cults forms the basis of exclusive claims to ownership, usually of ritual privileges, that stand in absolute contrast to the minimization of exclusive property rights in everyday, secular life. These various forms of ritual and intellectual property, Woodburn observed, are generally protected by secrecy, by deception and often by the threat of violence.50
让我们再来看看人类学家詹姆斯·伍德伯恩,以及他在研究 “立即返回” 的狩猎采集者时提出的一个不太知名的见解。他指出,即使在那些以其自信的平等主义而闻名的觅食者群体中,也有一个引人注目的例外,即任何成年人都不应该妄想直接命令他人,个人不应该对财产提出私人要求。这个例外出现在仪式、神圣的领域。在哈德扎宗教和许多俾格米群体的宗教中,加入男性(有时是女性)崇拜构成了对所有权的专属要求的基础,通常是仪式上的特权,这与日常、世俗生活中专属产权的最小化形成绝对的对比。伍德伯恩观察到,这些不同形式的仪式和知识产权,通常是通过保密、欺骗和经常的暴力威胁来保护。50
Here, Woodburn cites the sacred trumpets that initiated males of certain Pygmy groups keep hidden in secret places in the forest. Not only are women and children not supposed to know about such sacred treasures; should any follow the men to spy on them, they would be attacked or even raped.51 Strikingly similar practices involving sacred trumpets, sacred flutes or other fairly obvious phallic symbols are commonplace in certain contemporary societies of Papua New Guinea and Amazonia. Very often there is a complex game of secrets, whereby the instruments are periodically taken out of their hiding places and men pretend they are the voices of spirits, or use them as part of costumed masquerades in which they impersonate spirits to terrify women and children.52
在这里,伍德伯恩引用了某些俾格米人群体的男性在森林中的秘密地点所藏的神圣的喇叭声。不仅妇女和儿童不应该知道这种神圣的宝藏;如果有任何一个人跟着男人去偷看他们,他们就会受到攻击甚至被强奸。51在巴布亚新几内亚和亚马逊的某些当代社会中,涉及神圣的小号、神圣的长笛或其他相当明显的阳性符号的惊人的类似做法很常见。很多时候,有一种复杂的秘密游戏,即定期将这些乐器从藏身处拿出来,男人们假装它们是神灵的声音,或者将它们作为化装舞会的一部分,在舞会上冒充神灵来吓唬妇女和儿童。52
Now, these sacred items are, in many cases, the only important and exclusive forms of property that exist in societies where personal autonomy is taken to be a paramount value, or what we may simply call ‘free societies’. It’s not just relations of command that are strictly confined to sacred contexts, or even occasions when humans impersonate spirits; so too is absolute – or what we would today refer to as ‘private’ – property. In such societies, there turns out to be a profound formal similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.
现在,在许多情况下,这些神圣的物品是存在于个人自主权被认为是最重要的价值的社会中的唯一重要和排他的财产形式,或者我们可以简单地称之为 “自由社会”。不仅仅是严格限制在神圣背景下的命令关系,甚至是人类冒充神灵的场合;绝对的 —— 或者我们今天所说的 “私人” —— 财产也是如此。在这样的社会中,私人财产的概念和神圣的概念之间原来有深刻的形式上的相似性。从本质上讲,两者都是排斥性的结构。
Much of this is implicit – if never clearly stated or developed – in Émile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘the sacred’ as that which is ‘set apart’: removed from the world, and placed on a pedestal, at some times literally and at other times figuratively, because of its imperceptible connection with a higher force or being. Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning ‘not to be touched’. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar – almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects?
在埃米尔·杜克海姆对 “神圣” 的经典定义中,大部分内容都是隐含的 —— 尽管从未明确说明或发展过 —— “神圣” 是指被 “分开” 的东西:从世界中移除,并被置于基座上,有时是字面上的,有时是象征性的,因为它与更高的力量或存在有着不可感知的联系。杜克海姆神圣的最清晰的表达是波利尼西亚的术语Tabu,意思是 “不可触碰”。但是,当我们谈论绝对的私有财产时,我们是不是在谈论一些非常相似的东西 —— 事实上,在其基本逻辑和社会影响方面几乎是相同的?
As British legal theorists like to put it, individual property rights are held, notionally at least, ‘against the whole world’. If you own a car, you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from entering or using it. (If you think about it, this is the only right you have in your car that’s really absolute. Almost anything else you can do with a car is strictly regulated: where and how you can drive it, park it, and so forth. But you can keep absolutely anyone else in the world from getting inside it.) In this case the object is set apart, fenced about by invisible or visible barriers – not because it is tied to some supernatural being, but because it’s sacred to a specific, living human individual. In other respects, the logic is much the same.
正如英国法律理论家喜欢说的那样,至少在理论上,个人财产权是 “针对整个世界” 的。如果你拥有一辆车,你有权阻止全世界的任何人进入或使用它。(如果你想一想,这是你对你的汽车拥有的唯一真正绝对的权利。你对汽车所能做的其他事情几乎都有严格的规定:你可以在哪里以及如何驾驶它,停放它,等等。但你绝对可以阻止世界上任何其他人进入车内。)在这种情况下,物体被分开,被无形或有形的障碍物围起来 —— 不是因为它与某种超自然的存在有关,而是因为它对一个特定的、活生生的人类个体是神圣的。在其他方面,其逻辑是非常相同的。
To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that – quite unlike free societies – we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms. This is what the political scientist C. B. Macpherson meant by ‘possessive individualism’. Just as every man’s home is his castle, so your right not to be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned rests on the idea that you own your own body, just as you own your chattels and possessions, and legally have the right to exclude others from your land, or house, or car, and so on.53 As we’ve seen, those who did not share this particular European conception of the sacred could indeed be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned – and, from Amazonia to Oceania, they often were.54
认识到私有财产和神圣概念之间的密切相似之处,也就认识到了欧洲社会思想在历史上的怪异之处。这就是 —— 与自由社会完全不同 —— 我们把私有财产的这种绝对的、神圣的品质作为所有人类权利和自由的典范。这就是政治学家 C·B·麦弗逊所说的 “占有型个人主义”。正如每个人的家都是他的城堡一样,你不被杀害、折磨或任意监禁的权利建立在你拥有自己的身体的想法上,就像你拥有你的动产和财物一样,并且在法律上有权利排除其他人进入你的土地、房屋或汽车,等等。53正如我们所看到的,那些不认同这种特殊的欧洲神圣概念的人确实可以被杀害、折磨或任意监禁 —— 而且,从亚马逊到大洋洲,他们经常这样。54
For most Native American societies, this kind of attitude was profoundly alien. If it applied anywhere at all, then it was only with regard to sacred objects, or what the anthropologist Robert Lowie termed ‘sacra’ when he pointed out long ago that many of the most important forms of indigenous property were immaterial or incorporeal: magic formulae, stories, medical knowledge, the right to perform a certain dance, or stitch a certain pattern on one’s mantle. It was often the case that weapons, tools and even territories used to hunt game were freely shared – but the esoteric powers to safeguard the reproduction of game from one season to the next, or ensure luck in the chase, were individually owned and jealously guarded.55
对于大多数美洲原住民社会来说,这种态度是非常陌生的。如果它适用于任何地方,那么它只适用于圣物,或者人类学家罗伯特·洛维所说的 “圣物”,他很早就指出,许多最重要的土著财产形式是非物质的或无体的:魔法公式、故事、医学知识、表演某种舞蹈的权利,或在自己的斗篷上缝制某种图案。通常的情况是,用于狩猎的武器、工具甚至领地都是自由分享的 —— 但保障猎物从一个季节到下一个季节的繁衍,或确保追逐中的运气的神秘力量,则是个人拥有的,并受到严格保护。55
Quite often, sacra have both material and immaterial elements; as among the Kwakiutl, where ownership of an heirloom wooden feast-dish also conveyed the right to gather berries on a certain stretch of land with which to fill it; which in turn afforded its owner the right to present those berries while singing a certain song at a certain feast, and so forth.56 Such forms of sacred property are endlessly complex and variable. Among Plains societies of North America, for instance, sacred bundles (which normally included not only physical objects but accompanying dances, rituals and songs) were often the only objects in that society to be treated as private property: not just owned exclusively by individuals, but also inherited, bought and sold.57
很多时候,神圣财产既有物质因素,也有非物质因素;如在 Kwakiutl 人中,拥有一个传世的木制餐盘,也就意味着有权在某片土地上采集浆果来填充它;而这又使其主人有权在某次宴会上唱某首歌时展示这些浆果,等等。56这种神圣财产的形式是无尽的复杂和多变的。例如,在北美的平原社会中,神圣的捆绑物(通常不仅包括实物,还包括伴随的舞蹈、仪式和歌曲)往往是该社会中唯一被视为私有财产的物品:不仅由个人独家拥有,还可以继承、购买和出售。57
Often, the true ‘owners’ of land or other natural resources were said to be gods or spirits; mortal humans are merely squatters, poachers, or at best caretakers. People variously adopted a predatory attitude to resources – as with hunters, who appropriate what really belongs to the gods – or that of a caretaker (where one is only the ‘owner’ or ‘master’ of a village, or men’s house, or stretch of territory if one is ultimately responsible for maintaining and looking after it). Sometimes these attitudes coexist, as in Amazonia, where the paradigm for ownership (or ‘mastery’ – it’s always the same word) involves capturing wild animals and then adopting them as pets; that is, precisely the point where violent appropriation of the natural world turns into nurture or ‘taking care’.58
通常情况下,土地或其他自然资源的真正 “所有者” 据说是神或精灵;凡人只是擅自占用者、偷猎者,或者最多只是看守者。人们对资源采取不同的掠夺性态度 —— 如猎人,他们占有真正属于神灵的东西 —— 或看守人的态度(如果一个人最终负责维护和照看一个村庄、或男人的房子、或一片领土,他才是 “主人” 或 “主人”)。有时这些态度并存,比如在亚马逊地区,所有权(或 “掌握” —— 总是同一个词)的范式涉及捕捉野生动物,然后将它们作为宠物收养;也就是说,正是对自然世界的暴力占有变成了养育或 “照顾”。58
It is not unusual for ethnographers working with indigenous Amazonian societies to discover that almost everything around them has an owner, or could potentially be owned, from lakes and mountains to cultivars, liana groves and animals. As ethnographers also note, such ownership always carries a double meaning of domination and care. To be without an owner is to be exposed, unprotected.59 In what anthropologists refer to as totemic systems, of the kind we discussed for Australia and North America, the responsibility of care takes on a particularly extreme form. Each human clan is said to ‘own’ a certain species of animal – thus making them the ‘Bear clan’, ‘Elk clan’, ‘Eagle clan’ and so forth – but what this means is precisely that members of that clan cannot hunt, kill, harm or otherwise consume animals of that species. In fact, they are expected to take part in rituals that promote its existence and make it flourish.
与亚马逊原住民社会一起工作的民族志学者经常会发现,他们周围的一切几乎都有主人,或者有可能被拥有,从湖泊和山脉,到栽培品种、藤本植物林和动物。正如民族学家们所指出的,这种所有权总是带有支配和照顾的双重含义。没有主人就意味着暴露,不受保护。59在人类学家所说的图腾制度中,就像我们讨论的澳大利亚和北美的那种图腾制度,照顾的责任采取了一种特别极端的形式。据说每个人类部族都 “拥有” 某种动物 —— 从而使他们成为 “熊部族”、“麋鹿部族”、“鹰部族” 等等 —— 但这恰恰意味着该部族的成员不能狩猎、杀害、伤害或以其他方式消费该物种的动物。事实上,他们应该参加促进其存在并使其繁荣的仪式。
What makes the Roman Law conception of property – the basis of almost all legal systems today – unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will.
罗马法的财产概念 —— 今天几乎所有法律制度的基础 —— 的独特之处在于,照顾和分享的责任被降低到最低限度,甚至完全消除。在罗马法中,有三种与占有有关的基本权利:usus(使用权)、fructus(享受财产产品的权利,例如树的果实)和abusus(损害或破坏的权利)。如果一个人只拥有前两项权利,这被称为用益权,在法律上不被视为真正的占有。那么,真正的合法财产的决定性特征是,人们可以选择不照顾它,甚至可以随意毁坏它。
We are now, finally, approaching a general conclusion about the coming of private property, which can be illustrated by one last and especially striking example: the famous initiation rituals of the Australian Western Desert. Here adult males of each clan act as guardians or custodians of particular territories. There are certain sacra, known as churinga or tsurinja by the Aranda, which are relics of ancestors who effectively created each clan’s territory in ancient times. Mostly, they are smoothed pieces of wood or stone inscribed with a totemic emblem. The same objects could also embody legal title to those lands. Émile Durkheim considered them the very archetype of the sacred: things set apart from the ordinary world and accorded pious devotion; effectively, the ‘Holy Ark of the clan’.60
现在,我们终于接近了关于私有财产到来的一般结论,这可以通过最后一个特别引人注目的例子来说明:澳大利亚西部沙漠中著名的入会仪式。在这里,每个部族的成年男性都是特定领地的守护者或监护人。有一些 Sacra,阿兰达人称之为 churinga 或 tsurinja,它们是古代有效地创造每个部族领土的祖先的遗物。大多数情况下,它们是磨平的木头或石头,上面刻有图腾的标志。同样的物品也可以体现出对这些土地的合法所有权。埃米尔·杜克海姆认为它们是神圣的典型:从普通世界中分离出来的东西,被赋予虔诚的敬意;实际上是 “氏族的圣舟”。60
During periodic rites of initiation, new cohorts of male Aranda youths are taught about the history of the land and the nature of its resources. They are also charged with the responsibility of caring for it, which in particular means the duty to maintain churinga and the sacred sites associated with them, which only the initiated should properly know about in the first place. As observed by T. G. H. Strehlow – an anthropologist and the son of a Lutheran missionary, who spent many years among the Aranda in the early twentieth century, becoming the foremost non-Aranda authority on this topic – the weight of duty is conveyed through terror, torture and mutilation:
在定期举行的入会仪式上,新一批的阿兰达男性青年被教导有关土地的历史和资源的性质。他们还被赋予了照顾土地的责任,这尤其意味着有责任维护 churinga 和与之相关的圣地,而这些只有入门者才应该首先了解。正如 T·G·H·斯特雷洛 —— 人类学家和路德教会传教士的儿子,在二十世纪初在阿兰达人中呆了很多年,成为这个话题上最重要的非阿兰达人权威 —— 所观察到的那样,责任的重量是通过恐怖、酷刑和残害来传递的。
One or two months after the novice has submitted to circumcision, there follows the second principal initiation rite, that of sub-incision … The novice has now undergone all the requisite physical operations which have been designed to make him worthy of a man’s estate, and he has learned to obey the commands of the old men implicitly. His newly-found blind obedience stands in striking contrast to the unbridled insolence and general unruliness of temper which characterized his behaviour in the days of his childhood. Native children are usually spoiled by their parents. Mothers gratify every whim of their offspring, and fathers do not bother about any disciplinary measures. The deliberate cruelty with which the traditional initiation rites are carried out at a later age is carefully calculated to punish insolent and lawless boys for their past impudence and to train them into obedient, dutiful ‘citizens’ who will obey their elders without a murmur, and be fit heirs to the ancient sacred traditions of their clan.61
新生儿接受割礼一两个月后,接下来是第二个主要的入教仪式,即亚割礼…… 现在,新生儿已经经历了所有必要的身体操作,这些操作旨在使他配得上一个男人的身份,而且他已经学会隐蔽地服从老人的命令。他新发现的盲目服从与他童年时的行为特点 —— 肆无忌惮的傲慢和普遍的不羁形成了鲜明的对比。土生土长的孩子通常被他们的父母宠坏了。母亲满足其后代的每一个奇思妙想,而父亲则不屑于采取任何惩戒措施。传统的入教仪式在晚年进行,这种故意的残酷性是经过精心设计的,目的是为了惩罚无礼和无法无天的男孩过去的无礼行为,并把他们训练成顺从的、尽职的 “公民”,他们会毫无怨言地服从他们的长辈,并成为他们部族古老的神圣传统的合适继承人。61
Here is another, painfully clear example of how behaviour observed in ritual contexts takes exactly the opposite form to the free and equal relations that prevail in ordinary life. It is only within such contexts that exclusive (sacred) forms of property exist, strict and top-down hierarchies are enforced, and where orders given are dutifully obeyed.62
这是另一个痛苦而清晰的例子,说明在仪式背景下观察到的行为与普通生活中普遍存在的自由和平等关系完全相反。只有在这样的背景下,才存在排他性的(神圣的)财产形式,严格的、自上而下的等级制度才得以实施,所下达的命令才会被尽职尽责地服从。62
Looking back again to prehistory, it is – as we’ve already noted – impossible to know precisely which forms of property or ownership existed at places like Göbekli Tepe, Poverty Point, Sannai Maruyama or Stonehenge, any more than we can know if regalia buried with the ‘princes’ of the Upper Palaeolithic were their personal possessions. What we can now suggest, in light of these wider considerations, is that such carefully co-ordinated ritual theatres, often laid out with geometrical precision, were exactly the kinds of places where exclusive claims to rights over property – together with strict demands for unquestioning obedience – were likely to be made, among otherwise free people. If private property has an ‘origin’, it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself. The pertinent question to ask is not so much when this happened, as how it eventually came to order so many other aspects of human affairs.
再回过头来看史前,正如我们已经注意到的那样,我们不可能准确地知道在 Göbekli Tepe、贫困点、Sannai Maruyama 或 Stonehenge 这样的地方存在哪种形式的财产或所有权,就像我们不可能知道与上古石器时代的 “王子” 一起埋葬的礼器是否是他们的个人财产一样。鉴于这些更广泛的考虑,我们现在可以提出的是,这种精心协调的仪式剧场,往往是以几何学的精度来布置的,正是那种对财产权利的专属,以及对无条件服从的严格要求,有可能在其他自由人中产生的地方。如果私有财产有一个 “起源”,它就像神圣的想法一样古老,而神圣的想法可能和人类本身一样古老。要问的相关问题不是什么时候发生的,而是它最终是如何安排人类事务的许多其他方面的。
为什么加拿大觅食者保留奴隶而他们的加州邻居没有;或者,“生产方式” 的问题
Our world as it existed just before the dawn of agriculture was anything but a world of roving hunter-gatherer bands. It was marked, in many places, by sedentary villages and towns, some by then already ancient, as well as monumental sanctuaries and stockpiled wealth, much of it the work of ritual specialists, highly skilled artisans and architects.
在农业出现之前,我们的世界并不是一个由游荡的猎人·采集者组成的世界。在许多地方,它的标志是定居的村庄和城镇,有些当时已经很古老了,还有纪念碑式的圣地和囤积的财富,其中大部分是仪式专家、高度熟练的工匠和建筑师的作品。
When considering the broad sweep of history, most scholars either completely ignore this pre-agricultural world or write it off as some kind of strange anomaly: a false start to civilization. Palaeolithic hunters and Mesolithic fisherfolk may have buried their dead like aristocracy, but the ‘origins’ of class stratification are still sought in much later periods. Louisiana’s Poverty Point may have had the dimensions and at least some functions of an ancient city, but it is absent from most histories of North American urbanism, let alone urbanism in general; just as 10,000 years of Japanese civilization is sometimes written off as a prelude to the coming of rice-farming and metallurgy. Even the Calusa of Florida Keys are often referred to as an ‘incipient chiefdom’. What’s deemed important is not what they were, but the fact that they could be on the brink of turning into something else: a ‘proper’ kingdom, presumably, whose subjects paid tribute in crops.
当考虑到广泛的历史时,大多数学者要么完全忽略了这个前农业世界,要么把它写成某种奇怪的反常现象:文明的错误开始。旧石器时代的猎人和中石器时代的渔民可能像贵族一样埋葬他们的死者,但阶级分层的 “起源” 仍然在更晚的时期被寻找。路易斯安那州的贫困点可能具有古代城市的规模和至少一些功能,但它在大多数北美城市化的历史中是不存在的,更不用说一般的城市化了;就像一万年的日本文明有时被写成稻米种植和冶金业到来的前奏。甚至佛罗里达群岛的卡鲁萨人也经常被称为 “初具规模的酋长国”。人们认为重要的不是他们是什么,而是他们可能正处于变成其他东西的边缘:一个 “适当的” 王国,大概,其臣民以农作物进贡。
This peculiar habit of thought requires us to treat whole populations of ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ either as deviants, who took some kind of diversion from the evolutionary highway, or as lingering on the cusp of an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ that never quite took place. It’s bad enough when this is applied to a people like the Calusa, who were after all relatively small in number, living in complicated historical circumstances. Yet the same logic is regularly applied to the history of entire indigenous populations along the Pacific Coast of North America, in a territory running from present-day greater Los Angeles to the surroundings of Vancouver.
这种奇特的思维习惯要求我们把整个 “复杂的狩猎采集者” 群体视为异类,他们偏离了进化的轨道,或者是徘徊在从未发生过的 “农业革命” 的边缘。当这种说法被应用于像卡鲁萨人这样的民族时,已经很糟糕了,毕竟他们人数相对较少,生活在复杂的历史环境中。然而,同样的逻辑经常被应用于北美太平洋沿岸的整个原住民的历史,在从今天的大洛杉矶到温哥华周边地区的领土上。
When Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera in 1492, these lands were home to hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of inhabitants.1 They were foragers, but about as different from the Hadza, Mbuti or!Kung as one can imagine. Living in an unusually bounteous environment, often occupying villages year-round, the indigenous peoples of California, for example, were notorious for their industry and, in many cases, near-obsession with the accumulation of wealth. Archaeologists often characterize their techniques of land management as a kind of incipient agriculture; some even use Aboriginal California as a model for what the prehistoric inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent – who first began domesticating wheat and barley 10,000 years ago in the Middle East – might have been like.
1492 年,当克里斯托弗·哥伦布从帕洛斯·德拉弗龙特拉起航时,这些土地上有数十万,甚至数百万居民。1他们是觅食者,但与哈德扎人、姆布蒂人或!孔人的区别是人们可以想象的。例如,加利福尼亚的原住民生活在一个异常富饶的环境中,经常全年占据村庄,他们因其工业而臭名昭著,在许多情况下,他们几乎痴迷于财富的积累。考古学家经常将他们的土地管理技术描述为一种初生的农业;有些人甚至将加利福尼亚原住民作为史前新月沃土居民 —— 1 万年前在中东地区首次开始驯化小麦和大麦 —— 可能的模式。
To be fair to the archaeologists, it’s an obvious comparison, since ecologically California – with its ‘Mediterranean’ climate, exceptionally fertile soils and tight juxtaposition of micro-environments (deserts, forests, valleys, coastlands and mountains) – is remarkably similar to the western flank of the Middle East (the area, say, from modern Gaza or Amman north to Beirut and Damascus). On the other hand, a comparison with the inventors of farming makes little sense from the perspective of indigenous Californians, who could hardly have failed to notice the nearby presence – particularly among their Southwest neighbours – of tropical crops, including maize corn, which first arrived there from Mesoamerica around 4,000 years ago.2 While the free peoples of North America’s eastern seaboard nearly all adopted at least some food crops, those of the West Coast uniformly rejected them. Indigenous peoples of California were not pre-agricultural. If anything, they were anti-agricultural.
对考古学家来说,这是一个明显的比较,因为从生态学角度来说,加利福尼亚 —— 它的 “地中海” 气候、特别肥沃的土壤和微环境(沙漠、森林、山谷、海岸和山脉)的紧密并列 —— 与中东的西侧(例如,从现代加沙或安曼向北到贝鲁特和大马士革的地区)非常相似。另一方面,从加利福尼亚原住民的角度来看,与农耕发明者的比较没有什么意义,他们很难不注意到附近有热带作物的存在 —— 特别是在他们的西南邻居中 —— 包括玉米,这些作物大约在 4000 年前首次从中美洲来到那里。2虽然北美东部沿海地区的自由人几乎都采用了至少一些粮食作物,但西海岸的自由人却一致拒绝了这些作物。加利福尼亚的原住民并不是前农业民族。如果有的话,他们是反农业的。
The systematic nature of this rejection of agriculture is a fascinating phenomenon in itself. Most who attempt to explain it nowadays appeal almost entirely to environmental factors: relying on acorns or pine nuts as one’s staple in California, or aquatic resources further north, was simply ecologically more efficient than the maize agriculture adopted in other parts of North America. No doubt this was true on the whole, but in an area spanning several thousand miles and a wide variety of different ecosystems, it seems unlikely that there was not a single region where maize cultivation would have been advantageous. And if efficiency was the only consideration, one would have to imagine there were some cultigens – beans, squash, pumpkins, watermelons, any one of an endless variety of leafy vegetables – that someone, somewhere along the coast might have found worth adopting.
这种对农业的拒绝的系统性本身就是一个迷人的现象。如今,大多数试图解释这一现象的人,他们几乎完全诉诸于环境因素:在加利福尼亚依靠橡子或松子作为主食,或在更北的地方依靠水生资源,在生态上比在北美其他地方采用的玉米农业更有效。毫无疑问,这在总体上是正确的,但在一个横跨数千英里和各种不同生态系统的地区,似乎不可能没有一个地区的玉米种植是有利的。如果效率是唯一的考虑因素,人们不得不想象有一些栽培品种 —— 豆子、南瓜、南瓜、西瓜、任何一种无穷无尽的多叶蔬菜 —— 某人,在沿海某地可能发现值得采用。
The systematic rejection of all domesticated foodstuffs is even more striking when one realizes that many Californians and Northwest Coast peoples did plant and grow tobacco, as well as other plants – such as springbank clover and Pacific silverweed – which they used for ritual purposes, or as luxuries consumed only at special feasts.3 In other words, they were perfectly familiar with the techniques for planting and tending to cultigens. Yet they comprehensively rejected the idea of planting everyday foodstuffs or treating crops as staples.
当人们意识到许多加利福尼亚人和西北海岸人确实种植了烟草以及其他植物 —— 如春岸三叶草和太平洋银草 —— 他们将其用于仪式,或作为奢侈品只在特别的宴会上消费时,这种对所有驯化食品的系统性拒绝就更加引人注目了。3换句话说,他们完全熟悉种植和照料崇拜物的技术。然而,他们全面拒绝了种植日常食品或将农作物作为主食的想法。
One reason this rejection is significant is that it offers a clue as to how one might answer the much broader question we posed – but then left dangling – at the beginning of Chapter Four: what is it that causes human beings to spend so much effort trying to demonstrate that they are different from their neighbours? Recall how, after the end of the last Ice Age, the archaeological record is increasingly characterized by ‘culture areas’: that is, localized populations with their own characteristic styles of clothing, cooking and architecture; and no doubt also their own stories about the origin of the universe, rules for the marriage of cousins, and so forth. Ever since Mesolithic times, the broad tendency has been for human beings to further subdivide, coming up with endless new ways to distinguish themselves from their neighbours.
这种拒绝具有重要意义的一个原因是,它提供了一条线索,让我们可以回答我们在第四章开始时提出的更广泛的问题 —— 但后来又悬而未决:是什么导致人类花费如此多的精力来证明他们与邻居的不同?回顾一下,在上个冰河时代结束后,考古记录中越来越多地出现了 “文化区” 的特征:也就是说,局部的人口有他们自己特有的服装、烹饪和建筑风格;毫无疑问,还有他们自己关于宇宙起源的故事、表亲结婚的规则,等等。自中石器时代以来,人类的大趋势是进一步细分,想出无穷无尽的新方法来将自己与邻居区分开来。
It is curious how little anthropologists speculate about why this whole process of subdivision ever happened. It’s usually treated as self-evident, an inescapable fact of human existence. If any explanation is offered, it’s assumed to be an effect of language. Tribes or nations are regularly referred to as ‘ethno-linguistic’ groups; that is, what is really important about them is the fact they share the same language. Those who share the same language are presumed, all other things being equal, also to share the same customs, sensibilities and traditions of family life. Languages, in turn, are generally assumed to branch off from one another by something like a natural process.
奇怪的是,人类学家很少推测为什么这整个细分过程曾经发生。它通常被视为不言而喻的,是人类生存的一个不可避免的事实。如果提供任何解释,它被认为是语言的影响。部落或国家经常被称为 “民族语言” 群体;也就是说,他们真正重要的是他们拥有相同的语言。在所有其他条件相同的情况下,那些拥有相同语言的人被认为也拥有相同的习俗、情感和家庭生活传统。反过来,语言一般被认为是通过类似于自然过程的方式从彼此中分支出来的。
In this line of reasoning, a key breakthrough was the realization – usually attributed to Sir William Jones, a British colonial official stationed in Bengal towards the end of the eighteenth century – that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit all seem to derive from a common root. Before long, linguists had determined that Celtic, Germanic and Slavic languages – as well as Persian, Armenian, Kurdish and more – all belonged to the same ‘Indo-European’ family. Others, for instance Semitic, Turkic and East Asian languages, did not. Studying relationships among these various linguistic groups eventually led to the science of glottochronology: how distinct languages diverge from a common source. Since all languages are continually changing, and since that change appears to occur at a relatively steady pace, it became possible to reconstruct how and when Turkic languages began to separate from Mongolic, or the relative temporal distance between Spanish and French, Finnish and Estonian, Hawaiian and Malagasy, and so on. All this led to the construction of a series of linguistic family trees, and eventually an attempt – still highly controversial – to trace virtually all Eurasian languages to a single hypothetical ancestor called ‘Nostratic’. Nostratic was believed to have existed sometime during the later Palaeolithic, or even to have been the original phylum from which every human language sprang.
在这一推理过程中,一个关键的突破是意识到 —— 通常归功于 18 世纪末驻扎在孟加拉的英国殖民官员威廉·琼斯爵士 —— 希腊语、拉丁语和梵语似乎都来自一个共同的根源。不久之后,语言学家确定凯尔特语、日耳曼语和斯拉夫语 —— 以及波斯语、亚美尼亚语、库尔德语等等 —— 都属于同一个 “印欧语系”。其他语言,例如闪米特语、突厥语和东亚语言,则不是。研究这些不同的语言群体之间的关系最终导致了格罗托克学的诞生:不同的语言是如何从一个共同的源头分化出来的。由于所有语言都在不断变化,而且这种变化似乎是以相对稳定的速度发生的,因此有可能重建突厥语如何以及何时开始从蒙古语中分离出来,或者重建西班牙语和法语、芬兰语和爱沙尼亚语、夏威夷语和马达加斯加语之间的相对时间距离,等等。所有这些导致了一系列语言家族树的构建,并最终试图将几乎所有的欧亚语言都追溯到一个被称为 “Nostratic” 的假想祖先 —— 至今仍有很大争议。Nostratic 被认为存在于旧石器时代晚期的某个时候,甚至被认为是所有人类语言产生的原始系统。
It might seem strange to imagine linguistic drift causing a single idiom to evolve into languages as different as English, Chinese and Apache; but, given the extraordinarily long periods of time being considered here, even an accretion of tiny generational changes can, it seems, eventually transform the vocabulary and sound-structure, even the grammar of a language completely.
想象一下语言漂移导致一个成语演变为英语、汉语和阿帕奇语这样不同的语言似乎很奇怪;但是,鉴于这里考虑的时间特别长,即使是微小的代际变化的累积,似乎最终也能完全改变一种语言的词汇和声音结构,甚至语法。
If cultural differences largely correspond to what happens in language, then distinct human cultures, more generally, would have to be the product of a similar process of gradual drift. As populations migrated or became otherwise isolated from one another, they formed not only their own characteristic languages but their own traditional customs as well. All this involves any number of largely unexamined assumptions – for instance, why is it that languages are always changing to begin with? – but the main point is this. Even if we take such an explanation as a given, it doesn’t really explain what we actually observe on the ground.
如果文化差异在很大程度上与语言发生的情况相符,那么不同的人类文化,更广泛地说,将不得不是类似的逐渐漂移过程的产物。随着人口迁移或彼此隔离,他们不仅形成了自己的特色语言,还形成了自己的传统习俗。所有这一切都涉及任何数量的基本上未经审查的假设 —— 例如,为什么语言一开始就总是在变化?- 但主要的一点是这样的。即使我们把这样的解释作为一个既定事实,它也不能真正解释我们在实地观察到的情况。
Consider an ethno-linguistic map of northern California in the early twentieth century, set into a larger map of North American ‘culture areas’ as defined by ethnologists at that time:
考虑一下二十世纪初加利福尼亚北部的民族语言地图,它被镶嵌在当时民族学家所定义的北美 “文化区” 的大地图中。
What we are presented with here is a collection of people with broadly similar cultural practices, but speaking a jumble of languages, many drawn from entirely different language families – as distant from one another as, say, Arabic, Tamil and Portuguese. All these groups shared broad similarities: in terms of how they went about gathering and processing foodstuffs; in their most important religious rituals; in the organization of their political life, and so on. But there were also subtle or not-so-subtle differences between them, so that members of each group saw themselves as distinct kinds of people: Yurok, Hupa, Karok and so forth.
我们在这里看到的是一群具有大体相似的文化习俗的人,但却说着杂乱无章的语言,其中许多人来自完全不同的语系 —— 就像阿拉伯语、泰米尔语和葡萄牙语一样彼此相距遥远。所有这些群体都有广泛的相似之处:在他们如何采集和加工食品方面;在他们最重要的宗教仪式方面;在他们政治生活的组织方面,等等。但他们之间也有微妙的或不那么微妙的区别,因此,每个群体的成员都把自己看作是不同类型的人。尤罗克人、胡帕人、卡洛克人等等。
These local identities did map on to linguistic differences. However, neighbouring peoples speaking languages drawn from different families (Athabascan, Na-Dene, Uto-Aztecan and so on) actually had far more in common with each other, in almost every other way, than they did with speakers of languages from the same linguistic family living in other parts of North America. The same can be said of the First Nations of the Canadian Northwest Coast, who also speak a variety of unrelated languages, but in other ways resemble one another far more closely than they do speakers of the same languages from outside the Northwest Coast, including in California.
这些地方特征确实映射到了语言差异上。然而,讲不同语系语言(阿萨巴斯坎语、纳·迪内语、乌托·阿兹特克语等)的相邻民族,在几乎所有其他方面的共同点,都远远多于他们与生活在北美其他地区的同一语系的语言使用者之间的共同点。加拿大西北海岸的原住民也是如此,他们也讲各种不相关的语言,但在其他方面的相似度远远高于西北海岸以外的相同语言使用者,包括在加利福尼亚。
Of course, European colonization had a profound and catastrophic impact on the distribution of Native American peoples, but what we are seeing here also reflects a deeper continuity of culture-historical development, a process that tended to occur at various points in human history, when modern nation states were not around to order populations into neat ethno-linguistic groups. Arguably, the very idea that the world is divided into such homogeneous units, each with its own history, is largely a product of the modern nation state, and the desire of each to claim for itself a deep territorial lineage. At the very least, we should think twice before projecting such uniformities back in time, on to remote periods of human history for which no direct evidence of language distributions even exists.
当然,欧洲殖民化对美洲原住民的分布产生了深刻的、灾难性的影响,但我们在这里看到的也反映了文化·历史发展的更深层次的连续性,这个过程往往发生在人类历史的不同时期,当时现代民族国家还不在身边,无法将人口整理成整齐的种族·语言群体。可以说,世界被划分为这种同质的单位,每个单位都有自己的历史,这种想法在很大程度上是现代民族国家的产物,以及每个国家为自己宣称有深厚的领土血统的。至少,在把这种统一性投射到人类历史的遥远时期之前,我们应该三思而后行,因为这些时期甚至不存在关于语言分布的直接证据。
In this chapter, we want to explore what actually did drive processes of cultural subdivision for the greater part of human history. Such processes are crucial to understanding how human freedoms, once taken for granted, eventually came to be lost. In doing this, we’ll focus on the history of those non-agricultural peoples who inhabited the western coast of North America. As their refusal of agriculture implies, these processes were likely far more self-conscious than scholars usually imagine. In some cases, as we’ll see, they appear to have involved explicit reflection and argument about the nature of freedom itself.
在本章中,我们想探讨在人类历史的大部分时间里,究竟是什么推动了文化细分的进程。这种过程对于理解曾经被视为理所当然的人类自由是如何最终丧失的至关重要。在此过程中,我们将关注那些居住在北美西海岸的非农业民族的历史。正如他们对农业的拒绝所暗示的那样,这些过程可能比学者们通常想象的要自觉得多。在某些情况下,正如我们所看到的,他们似乎对自由的性质本身进行了明确的思考和争论。
How did earlier generations of scholars describe these regional clusters of societies? The term most commonly used, up until the middle of the twentieth century, was ‘culture areas’ (or ‘culture circles’), a concept which, nowadays, has either been forgotten or fallen into disrepute.
前几代学者是如何描述这些区域性的社会集群的?直到二十世纪中叶,最常用的术语是 “文化区”(或 “文化圈”),如今这个概念要么被遗忘,要么变得不伦不类。
The notion of ‘culture areas’ first emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. Since the Renaissance, human history had been seen largely as the story of great migrations: humans, having fallen from grace, wandering ever more distant from the Garden of Eden. Family trees showing the dispersal of Indo-European or Semitic languages did nothing to discourage this kind of thinking. But the notion of human progress pulled in the exact opposite direction: it encouraged researchers to imagine ‘primitive’ peoples as tiny, isolated communities, cut off from each other and the larger world. This, of course, is what made it possible to treat them as specimens of earlier stages of human development in the first place: if everyone were in regular contact with each other, this sort of evolutionist analysis wouldn’t really work.4
“文化区” 的概念最早出现在 19 世纪的最后几十年和 20 世纪的最初阶段。自文艺复兴以来,人类历史在很大程度上被看作是大迁徙的故事:人类在堕落之后,在离伊甸园越来越远的地方徘徊。显示印欧语系或闪族语言散布情况的家谱并没有阻止这种想法的产生。但是,人类进步的概念却恰恰相反:它鼓励研究人员将 “原始” 民族想象成微小的、孤立的社区,与彼此和大世界隔绝。当然,这正是将他们作为人类发展早期阶段的标本的原因:如果每个人都经常相互接触,这种进化论的分析就不会真正起作用。4
The notion of ‘culture areas’, by contrast, came largely out of museums, and particularly in North America. Curators organizing art and artefacts had to decide whether to arrange their material so as to illustrate theories about the different stages of human adaptation (Lower Savagery, Upper Savagery, Lower Barbarism and so on); or so as to trace the history of ancient migrations, whether real or imagined (in the American context this would mean organizing them by language family, then assumed, for no particularly good reason, to correspond with ‘racial’ stocks); or whether to simply organize them into regional clusters.5 Though the last of these seemed most arbitrary, it proved to be the one that really worked best. Art and technology from different Eastern Woodlands tribes, for instance, appeared to have much more in common than material from, say, all speakers of Athabascan languages; or all people who relied mainly on fishing, or cultivated maize. This method turned out to work quite well for archaeological material too, with prehistorians like the Australian V. Gordon Childe observing similar patterns among Neolithic villages stretching across central Europe, forming regional clusters of evidence relating to domestic life, art and ritual.
相比之下,“文化区” 的概念主要来自于博物馆,特别是在北美。馆长们在整理艺术品和工艺品时,必须决定是安排他们的材料以说明人类适应的不同阶段的理论(下野蛮时代、上未开化时代、下未开化时代等等);还是追溯古代移民的历史,无论是真实的还是想象的(在美洲的背景下,这意味着按语言家族组织它们,然后没有特别好的理由,假定与 “种族” 种群相对应);或者是否只是将它们组织成区域群组。5尽管最后一种方法似乎是最随意的,但它被证明是真正最有效的一种方法。例如,来自不同的东部林地部落的艺术和技术,似乎比来自所有讲阿萨巴斯坎语的人,或者所有主要依靠捕鱼或种植玉米的人的材料有更多的共同点。这种方法对考古材料也很有效,像澳大利亚的 V·戈登·奇尔德这样的史前学家在横跨欧洲中部的新石器时代村庄中观察到了类似的模式,形成了与家庭生活、艺术和仪式有关的区域证据集群。
At first, the most prominent exponent of the culture area approach was Franz Boas. Boas, it will be recalled, was a transplanted German ethnologist6 who in 1899 landed a chair in anthropology at New York’s Columbia University. He also gained a position in charge of ethnographic collections at the American Museum of Natural History, where his halls dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and Northwest Coast still remain popular attractions over a century later. Boas’s student and successor at the museum, Clark Wissler, tried to systematize his ideas by dividing the Americas as a whole, from Newfoundland to Tierra del Fuego, into fifteen different regional systems, each with its own characteristic customs, aesthetic styles, ways of obtaining and preparing food, and forms of social organization. Before long, other ethnologists were undertaking similar projects, mapping out regions from Europe to Oceania.
起初,文化区方法最突出的支持者是弗朗兹·博厄斯。我们可以回顾一下,博厄斯是一位移居国外的德国民族学家。61899 年,他在纽约的哥伦比亚大学担任人类学教授。他还在美洲自然历史博物馆获得了一个负责民族学收藏的职位,在那里,他专门为东部林地和西北海岸设计的大厅在一个多世纪后仍然是受欢迎的景点。博厄斯的学生和博物馆的继任者克拉克·维斯勒试图将他的想法系统化,将美洲作为一个整体,从纽芬兰到火地岛,分为 15 个不同的区域系统,每个系统都有自己的特色习俗、审美风格、获取和准备食物的方式,以及社会组织形式。不久之后,其他民族学家也开展了类似的项目,绘制了从欧洲到大洋洲的区域图。
Boas was a staunch anti-racist. As a German Jew, he was particularly troubled by the way the American obsession with race and eugenics was being taken up in his own mother country.7 When Wissler began to embrace certain eugenicist ideas, the pair had a bitter falling-out. But the original impetus for the culture area concept was precisely to find a way of talking about human history which avoided ranking populations into higher or lower on any grounds, whether claiming some were of superior genetic stock or had reached a more advanced level of moral and technological evolution. Instead, Boas and his students proposed that anthropologists reconstruct the diffusion of what were then referred to as ‘culture traits’ (ceramics, sweat lodges, the organization of young men into competing warrior societies), and try to understand why, as Wissler put it, tribes of a certain region came to share ‘the same mesh of culture traits’.8
博厄斯是一个坚定的反种族主义者。作为一个德国犹太人,他对美洲人对种族和优生学的迷恋在他自己的祖国被接受的方式感到特别不安。7当维斯勒开始接受某些优生学思想时,他们两人发生了激烈的争吵。但是,文化区概念的最初动力正是为了找到一种谈论人类历史的方式,避免以任何理由对人口进行高低排序,不管是声称某些人的遗传基因优越还是达到了更先进的道德和技术进化水平。相反,博厄斯和他的学生建议人类学家重建当时被称为 “文化特征”(陶瓷、汗蒸房、将年轻人组织成竞争性的战士社会)的传播,并试图理解为什么,正如维斯勒所说,某个地区的部落会共享 “相同的文化特征网”。8
This resulted in a peculiar fascination with reconstructing the historical movement, or ‘diffusion’, of specific customs and ideas. Flipping through anthropological journals from the turn of the twentieth century, you find that the majority of the essays in a given number are of this type. They paid special attention to contemporary games and musical instruments used, say, in various different parts of Africa, or of Oceania – perhaps because, of all culture traits, these seemed least affected by practical considerations or constraints, and their distribution might therefore shed light on historical patterns of contact and influence. One especially lively area of debate concerned the string-figure game known as cat’s cradles. During the Torres Straits expedition of 1898, Professors Alfred Haddon and W. H. R. Rivers, then leading figures in British anthropology, developed a uniform method of diagramming string figures used in children’s play, which made it possible for systematic comparisons to be made. Before long, rival theories concerning the origins and diffusion of particular patterns of string figures (the Palm Tree, the Bagobo Diamond…) among different societies were being hotly contested in the pages of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society and similar erudite venues.9
这导致了对重建特定习俗和思想的历史运动,或 “扩散” 的奇特迷恋。翻开二十世纪之交的人类学杂志,你会发现某个数字中的大部分文章都是这种类型的。他们特别关注当代的游戏和乐器,例如在非洲或大洋洲的不同地区使用的游戏和乐器 —— 也许是因为在所有的文化特征中,这些似乎受实际考虑或限制的影响最小,因此它们的分布可能揭示了接触和影响的历史模式。一个特别活跃的辩论领域涉及到被称为 “猫咪摇篮” 的弦乐游戏。在 1898 年托雷斯海峡考察期间,当时英国人类学界的领军人物阿尔弗雷德·哈登教授和 W·H.R·里弗斯教授开发了一种统一的方法,将儿童游戏中使用的绳索图示化,这使得系统的比较成为可能。不久之后,关于不同社会中特定弦乐图(棕榈树、Bagobo 钻石…… )的起源和传播的对立理论在《皇家人类学会杂志》和类似的博学场所进行了激烈的争论。9
The obvious questions, then, were: why culture traits cluster as they do; and how they come to be ‘enmeshed’ in regional patterns to begin with. Boas himself was convinced that while geography might have defined the circulation of ideas within particular regions (mountains and deserts forming natural barriers), what happened inside those regions was, effectively, down to historical accident. Others hypothesized about the predominating ethos or form of organization within a given region; or dreamed of creating a kind of natural science that might one day explain or even predict the ebb and flow of styles, habits and social forms. Almost no one reads this literature any more. Like the cat’s cradles, today it’s considered at best an amusing token of the discipline’s childhood.
那么,显而易见的问题是:为什么文化特征会像它们那样聚集在一起;以及它们是如何开始 “被卷入” 区域模式的。 博厄斯本人确信,虽然地理环境可能界定了特定区域内的思想流通(山脉和沙漠形成了自然屏障),但这些区域内发生的事情实际上是历史的偶然。另一些人则假设了一个特定区域内占主导地位的精神或组织形式;或者梦想创造一种自然科学,有朝一日可以解释或甚至预测风格、习惯和社会形式的起伏。现在几乎没有人再读这种文献了。就像猫的摇篮一样,今天它最多被认为是这门学科的童年的一个有趣的象征。
Still, important issues were raised here: issues which no one to this day has really been able to address. For example, why are the peoples of California so similar to one another, and so different from neighbouring peoples of the American Southwest, or the Canadian Northwest Coast? Perhaps the most insightful contribution came from Marcel Mauss, who tackled the notion of ‘culture areas’ in a series of essays on nationalism and civilization written between 1910 and 1930.10 Mauss thought the idea of cultural ‘diffusion’ was mostly nonsense; not for the reasons most anthropologists do now (that it’s pointless and uninteresting),11 but because he felt it was based on a false assumption: that the movement of people, technologies and ideas was somehow unusual.
不过,这里还是提出了重要的问题:至今没有人能够真正解决这些问题。例如,为什么加利福尼亚的人民彼此之间如此相似,而与美洲西南部或加拿大西北海岸的邻国人民如此不同?也许最有洞察力的贡献来自于马塞尔·莫斯,他在 1910 年至 1930 年间写的一系列关于民族主义和文明的文章中解决了 “文化区” 的概念。10莫斯认为文化 “扩散” 的想法大多是无稽之谈;并不是像现在大多数人类学家那样(认为它毫无意义和无趣)。11而是因为他觉得它建立在一个错误的假设之上:人、技术和思想的流动在某种程度上是不寻常的。
The exact opposite was true, Mauss argued. People in past times, he wrote, appear to have travelled a great deal – more than they do today – and it’s simply impossible to imagine that anyone back then would have been unaware of the existence of basketry, feather pillows, or the wheel if such objects were regularly employed a month or two’s journey away; the same could presumably be said of ancestor cults or syncopated drum rhythms. Mauss went further. He was convinced the entire Pacific Rim had once been a single realm of cultural exchange, with voyagers criss-crossing it at regular intervals. He too was interested in the distribution of games across the entire region. Once, he taught a college course called ‘On the greasy pole, the ball play, and other games on the periphery of the Pacific Ocean’, his premise being that, at least when it came to games, all lands bordering the Pacific – from Japan to New Zealand to California – could be treated, effectively, as a single culture area.12 Legend has it that when Mauss, visiting New York’s American Museum of Natural History, was shown the famous Kwakiutl war canoe in Boas’s Northwest Coast wing, his first reaction was to say that now he knew precisely what ancient China must have looked like.
莫斯认为,事实恰恰相反。他写道,过去的人们似乎经常旅行 —— 比今天更多 —— 而且根本不可能想象当时的人不知道篮子、羽毛枕头或轮子的存在,如果这些东西经常在一两个月的旅程中被使用的话;祖先崇拜或切分音鼓的节奏大概也是如此。莫斯走得更远。他相信整个环太平洋地区曾经是一个单一的文化交流领域,航行者定期在这里交错往来。他也对整个地区的游戏分布感兴趣。有一次,他在大学里讲授了一门名为 “在油腻的杆子上玩球,以及太平洋周边的其他游戏” 的课程,他的前提是,至少在游戏方面,所有与太平洋接壤的土地 —— 从日本到新西兰到加利福尼亚 —— 都可以有效地被视为一个单一的文化区域。12传说中,当莫斯访问纽约的美洲自然历史博物馆时,在博厄斯的西北海岸翼展示了著名的 Kwakiutl 战舟,他的第一反应是说,现在他确切地知道古代中国一定是什么样子的。
Though Mauss overstated his case, his exaggeration nonetheless led him to reframe the entire question of ‘culture areas’ in an intriguing way.13 For if everyone was broadly aware of what surrounding people were up to, and if knowledge of foreign customs, arts and technologies was widespread, or at least easily available, then the question becomes not why certain culture traits spread, but why other culture traits didn’t. The answer, Mauss felt, is that this is precisely how cultures define themselves against their neighbours. Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal. Chinese are people who use chopsticks, but not knives and forks; Thai are people who use spoons, but not chopsticks, and so forth. It’s easy enough to see how this could be true of aesthetics – styles of art, music or table manners – but surprisingly, Mauss found, it extended even to technologies which held obvious adaptive or utilitarian benefits. He was intrigued, for example, by the fact that Athabascans in Alaska steadfastly refused to adopt Inuit kayaks, despite these being self-evidently more suited to the environment than their own boats. Inuit, for their part, refused to adopt Athabascan snowshoes.
尽管莫斯夸大了他的情况,但他的夸张还是使他以一种有趣的方式重新构建了 “文化区” 的整个问题。13因为如果每个人都广泛了解周围的人在做什么,如果对外国习俗、艺术和技术的了解很普遍,或者至少很容易得到,那么问题就不是为什么某些文化特征会传播,而是为什么其他文化特征没有传播。莫斯认为,答案是,这正是文化对其邻国的自我定义。文化实际上是拒绝的结构。中国人使用筷子,但不使用刀和叉;泰国人使用勺子,但不使用筷子,等等。很容易看出这可能是美学的真实情况 —— 艺术风格、音乐或餐桌礼仪 —— 但令人惊讶的是,莫斯发现,它甚至延伸到具有明显适应性或功利性的技术上。例如,他对阿拉斯加的阿萨巴斯克人坚定地拒绝采用因纽特人的皮艇这一事实感到好奇,尽管这些皮艇不言而喻地比他们自己的船更适合于环境。因纽特人则拒绝采用阿萨巴斯克人的雪鞋。
What was true of particular cultures was equally true of culture areas; or, as Mauss preferred, ‘civilizations’. Since almost any existing style, form or technique has always been potentially available to almost anyone, these too must always have come about through some such combination of borrowing and refusal. Crucially, Mauss noted, this process tends to be quite self-conscious. He especially liked to evoke the example of debates in Chinese courts about the adoption of foreign styles and customs, such as the remarkable argument put forward by a king of the Zhou Dynasty to his advisors and great feudal vassals, who were refusing to wear the Hunnish (Manchu) dress and to ride horses instead of driving chariots: he painstakingly tried to show them the difference between rites and customs, between the arts and fashion. ‘Societies’, wrote Mauss, ‘live by borrowing from each other, but they define themselves rather by the refusal of borrowing than by its acceptance.’14
特定文化的真实情况同样适用于文化领域;或者,正如莫斯所喜欢的,“文明”。由于几乎任何现存的风格、形式或技术都有可能为任何人所用,所以这些也一定是通过某种借用和拒绝的组合而产生的。重要的是,莫斯指出,这个过程往往是相当自觉的。他特别喜欢引用中国宫廷中关于采用外国风格和习俗的辩论的例子,例如周朝的一位国王对他的顾问和大封建臣子提出的非凡论点,他们拒绝穿匈奴(满族)的衣服,拒绝骑马而不是驾驶战车:他煞费苦心地试图向他们展示礼仪和习俗、艺术和时尚之间的区别。“社会”,莫斯写道,“通过相互借鉴而生存,但他们对自己的定义是拒绝借鉴而不是接受借鉴。”14
Nor are such reflections limited to what historians think of as ‘high’ (that is, literate) civilizations. Inuit did not simply react with instinctual revulsion when they first encountered someone wearing snowshoes, and then refused to change their minds. They reflected on what adopting, or not adopting, snowshoes might say about the kind of people they considered themselves to be. In fact, Mauss concluded, it is precisely in comparing themselves with their neighbours that people come to think of themselves as distinct groups.
这种反思也不限于历史学家认为的 “高等”(也就是有文化的)文明。当因纽特人第一次遇到穿雪鞋的人时,他们并不只是本能的反感,然后拒绝改变主意。他们反思了采用或不采用雪鞋可能说明他们认为自己是什么样的人。事实上,莫斯总结说,正是在将自己与邻居进行比较时,人们才会认为自己是一个独特的群体。
Framed in this way, the question of how ‘culture areas’ formed is necessarily a political one. It raises the possibility that decisions such as whether or not to adopt agriculture weren’t just calculations of caloric advantage or matters of random cultural taste, but also reflected questions about values, about what humans really are (and consider themselves to be), and how they should properly relate to one another. Just the kinds of issues, in fact, which our own post-Enlightenment intellectual tradition tends to express through terms like freedom, responsibility, authority, equality, solidarity and justice.
以此为框架,“文化区” 如何形成的问题必然是一个政治问题。它提出了这样一种可能性:诸如是否采用农业的决定不仅仅是热量优势的计算或随机的文化品味问题,而且还反映了关于价值观的问题,关于人类到底是什么(以及认为自己是什么),以及他们应该如何适当地相互联系。事实上,这些问题正是我们自己的后启蒙思想传统倾向于通过自由、责任、权威、平等、团结和正义等术语来表达的。
Let us return, then, to the Pacific. Since around the start of the twentieth century, anthropologists have divided the indigenous inhabitants of North America’s western littoral into two broad culture areas: ‘California’ and the ‘Northwest Coast’. Before the nineteenth century, when the effects of the fur trade and then the Gold Rush wreaked havoc on indigenous groups and many were exterminated, these populations formed a continuous chain of foraging societies extending through much of the West Coast: at that time, perhaps the largest continuous distribution of foraging peoples in the world. If nothing else, it was a highly efficient way of life; both the Northwest Coast peoples and those of California maintained higher densities of population than, say, maize, beans and squash farmers of the nearby Great Basin and American Southwest.
那么,让我们回到太平洋地区。大约从二十世纪初开始,人类学家就把北美西部沿海地区的原住民分为两大文化区。“加州” 和 “西北海岸”。在十九世纪之前,毛皮贸易和淘金热的影响对原住民群体造成了严重的破坏,许多人被灭绝,这些人口形成了一个连续的觅食社会链,延伸到西海岸的大部分地区:在当时,也许是世界上最大的连续觅食民族分布。如果不出意外,这是一种高效的生活方式;西北海岸的,以及加利福尼亚的人民都保持着较高的人口密度,比起附近大盆地和美洲西南部的玉米、豆类和南瓜农民来说。
In other ways, the northern and southern zones were profoundly different, both ecologically and culturally. The peoples of the Canadian Northwest Coast relied heavily on fishing, and particularly the harvesting of anadromous fish such as salmon and eulachon, which migrate upriver from the sea to spawn; as well as a variety of marine mammals, terrestrial plants and game resources. As we saw a couple of chapters ago, these groups divided their year between very large coastal winter villages, holding ceremonies of great complexity, and, in spring and summer, smaller social units that were more pragmatically focused on the provision of food. Expert woodworkers, they also transformed the local conifers (fir, spruce, redwood, yew and cedar) into a dazzling material culture of carved and painted masks, containers, tribal crests, totem poles, richly decorated houses and canoes which ranks among the world’s most striking artistic traditions.
在其他方面,北部和南部地区在生态和文化上都有深刻的不同。加拿大西北海岸的人民严重依赖捕鱼,特别是收获溯河而上的鱼类,如鲑鱼和银鱼,它们从海里迁移到上游产卵;以及各种海洋哺乳动物、陆生植物和游戏资源。正如我们在前几章所看到的,这些群体将他们的一年划分为非常大的沿海冬季村庄,举行非常复杂的仪式,而在春季和夏季,较小的社会单位更务实地专注于提供食物。作为木工专家,他们还将当地的针叶树(冷杉、云杉、红木、紫杉和雪松)改造成令人眼花缭乱的物质文化,包括雕刻和绘画的面具、容器、部落徽章、图腾柱、装饰丰富的房屋和独木舟,这些都是世界上最引人注目的艺术传统之一。
Aboriginal societies in California, to the south, occupied one of the world’s most diverse habitats. They made use of a staggering variety of terrestrial resources, which they managed by careful techniques of burning, clearing and pruning. The region’s ‘Mediterranean’ climate and tightly compressed topography of mountains, deserts, foothills, river valleys and coastlines made for a rich assortment of local flora and fauna, exchanged at inter-tribal trade fairs. Most Californians were proficient fishers and hunters, but many also followed an ancient reliance on tree crops – especially nuts and acorns – as staple foods. Their artistic traditions differed from those of the Northwest Coast. House exteriors were generally plain and simple. There was almost nothing similar to the Northwest Coast masks or monumental sculptures that so delight museum curators; rather, aesthetic activity focused on the weaving of highly patterned baskets used for storing and serving food.15
南方加利福尼亚的原住民社会占据了世界上最多样化的栖息地之一。他们利用了种类繁多的陆地资源,并通过精心的燃烧、清理和修剪技术来管理这些资源。该地区的 “地中海” 气候和由山脉、沙漠、山麓、河谷和海岸线组成的紧凑的地形使当地的动植物种类丰富,在部落间的交易会上进行交换。大多数加利福尼亚人都是熟练的渔民和猎人,但许多人也遵循古代对树木作物的依赖 —— 特别是坚果和橡子 —— 作为主食。他们的艺术传统与西北海岸的人不同。房屋的外观一般都很朴素和简单。几乎没有类似于西北海岸的面具或纪念碑式的雕塑,这让博物馆馆长很高兴;相反,审美活动集中在编织用于储存和供应食物的高图案的篮子上。15
There was a further important difference between these two extensive groupings of societies, one that for some reason is far less remarked on by scholars today. From the Klamath River northwards, there existed societies dominated by warrior aristocracies engaged in frequent inter-group raiding and in which, traditionally, a significant portion of the population had consisted of chattel slaves. This apparently had been true as long as anyone living there could remember. But none of this was the case further south. How exactly did this happen? How did a boundary emerge between one extended ‘family’ of foraging societies that habitually raided each other for slaves, and another that did not keep slaves at all?
在这两个广泛的社会群体之间还有一个重要的区别,由于某种原因,今天的学者们很少注意到这个问题。从克拉玛斯河往北,存在着由战士贵族主导的社会,从事,经常进行群体间的突袭,在这些社会中,传统上有很大一部分人口是动产奴隶。显然,只要生活在那里的人能够记得,这就是事实。但在更远的南方,情况就不是这样了。这到底是怎么发生的?在一个习惯性地相互袭击奴隶的觅食社会 “大家庭” 和另一个根本不保留奴隶的社会之间,是如何出现界限的?
You might think there would be a lively debate about this among scholars, but in fact there isn’t. Instead, most treat the differences as insignificant, preferring to lump all Californian and Northwest Coast societies together in a single category of ‘affluent foragers’ or ‘complex hunter-gatherers’.16 If differences between them are considered at all, they are usually understood as mechanical responses to their contrasting modes of subsistence: aquatic (fish-based) economies, it’s argued, simply tended to foster warlike societies, just as terrestrial (acorn-based) foraging economies somehow did not.17 We will shortly consider the merits and limitations of such recent arguments, but first it is useful to turn back to some of the ethnographic work undertaken by earlier generations.
你可能认为学者们会就此展开热烈的辩论,但事实上并没有。相反,大多数人将这些差异视为无足轻重,宁愿将所有加利福尼亚和西北海岸的社会归为 “富裕的觅食者” 或 “复杂的狩猎采集者” 这一类。16如果考虑到它们之间的差异,它们通常被理解为对它们截然不同的生存方式的机械反应:人们认为,水生(以鱼为基础的)经济只是倾向于培养好战的社会,就像陆生(以橡子为基础的)觅食经济不知为何没有。17我们很快就会考虑这些最新论点的优点和局限性,但首先应该回头看看前几代人进行的一些民族学工作。
Some of the most striking research about the indigenous peoples of California was done by the twentieth-century anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt. One of his key writings, unobtrusively entitled ‘an ethnological contribution to the sociology of knowledge’, was concerned with the Yurok and other related groups who inhabited the northwestern corner of California, just south of the mountain ranges where Oregon begins.18 For Goldschmidt and members of his anthropological circle, the Yurok were famous for the central role that money – which took the form of white dentalium shells arranged on strings, and headbands made of bright red woodpecker scalps – played in every aspect of their social lives.
关于加州原住民的一些最引人注目的研究是由二十世纪人类学家沃尔特·戈德施密特完成的。他的主要著作之一,不引人注意地题为 “对知识社会学的民族学贡献”,涉及居住在加利福尼亚西北角的尤罗克人和其他相关群体,就在俄勒冈州开始的山脉以南。18对戈德施密特和他的人类学圈子的成员来说,尤罗克人因金钱的核心作用而闻名 —— 金钱的形式是串在一起的白色牙胶壳,以及用鲜红的啄木鸟头皮制成的头巾 —— 在他们社会生活的各个方面发挥着作用。
It’s worth mentioning here that settlers in different parts of North America referred to a whole variety of things as ‘Indian money’. Often these were shell beads or actual shells. But in almost every case, the term is largely a projection of European categories on to objects that look like money, but really aren’t. Probably the most famous of these, wampum, did eventually come to be used as a trade currency in transactions between settlers and indigenous peoples of the Northeast, and was even accepted as currency in several American states for transactions between settlers (in Massachusetts and New York, for instance, wampum was legal tender in shops). In dealings between indigenous people, however, it was almost never used to buy or sell anything. Rather, it was employed to pay fines, and as a way of forming and remembering compacts and agreements. This was true in California as well. But in California, unusually, money also seems to have been used in more or less the way we expect money to have been used: for purchases, rentals and loans. In California in general, and its northwest corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that – according to Goldschmidt – bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber in his famous 1905 essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
这里值得一提的是,北美不同地区的定居者将各种各样的东西称为 “印第安人的钱”。这些东西往往是贝壳珠子或真正的贝壳。但几乎在每一种情况下,这个术语在很大程度上是欧洲人对那些看起来像钱但实际上不是钱的东西的一种投射。其中最有名的可能是 wampum,它最终被用作定居者和东北部原住民之间交易的贸易货币,而且,甚至被美洲几个州接受为定居者之间交易的货币(例如在马萨诸塞州和纽约州,wampum 是商店的法定货币)。然而,在原住民之间的交易中,它几乎从未被用来购买或出售任何东西。相反,它被用来支付罚款,以及作为形成和记住契约和协议的一种方式。这在加利福尼亚也是如此。但在加利福尼亚,不同寻常的是,货币的使用方式似乎或多或少与我们期望的货币使用方式相同:用于购买、租赁和贷款。在加利福尼亚,特别是其西北角,货币在原住民社会中的核心作用与强调节俭和简单的文化相结合,不赞成浪费的快乐,以及对工作的颂扬,根据戈德施密特的说法,这与马克斯·韦伯在其 1905 年著名的文章《新教伦理与资本主义精神》中描述的清教徒态度有着惊人的相似之处。
This analogy might seem a bit of a stretch, and in many ways it was. But it’s important to understand the comparison that Goldschmidt was actually making. Weber’s essay, familiar to just about anyone who’s ever taken a social science course, is often misunderstood. Weber was trying to answer a very specific question: why capitalism emerged in western Europe, and not elsewhere. Capitalism, as he defined it, was itself a kind of moral imperative. Almost everywhere in the world, he noted, and certainly in China, India and the Islamic world, one found commerce, wealthy merchants and people who might justly be referred to as ‘capitalists’. But almost everywhere, anyone who acquired an enormous fortune would eventually cash in their chips. They would either buy themselves a palace and enjoy life, or come under enormous moral pressure from their community to spend their profits on religious or public works, or boozy popular festivities (usually they did a bit of both).
这个比喻可能看起来有点牵强,而且在许多方面是这样的。但重要的是,要理解戈德施密特实际上在做的比较。韦伯的文章,几乎所有上过社会科学课程的人都很熟悉,但常常被误解。韦伯试图回答一个非常具体的问题:为什么资本主义出现在西欧,而不是其他地方。按照他的定义,资本主义本身就是一种道德上的要求。他指出,几乎在世界任何地方,当然在中国、印度和伊斯兰世界,人们都能找到商业、富商和可以被公正地称为 “资本家” 的人。但几乎在任何地方,任何获得巨大财富的人最终都会兑现他们的筹码。他们要么给自己买一座宫殿,享受生活,要么承受来自社区的巨大道德压力,将他们的利润用于宗教或公共工程,或用于豪饮的大众庆典(通常他们两者都做)。
Capitalism, on the other hand, involved constant reinvestment, turning one’s wealth into an engine for creating ever more wealth, increasing production, expanding operations, and so forth. But imagine, Weber suggested, being the very first person in one’s community to act this way. To do so would have meant defying all social expectations, to be utterly despised by almost all your neighbours – who would, increasingly, also become your employees. Anyone capable of acting in such a defiantly single-minded manner, Weber observed, would ‘have to be some sort of hero’. This, he said, is the reason why it took a Puritanical strain of Christianity, like Calvinism, to make capitalism possible. Puritans not only believed almost anything they could spend their profits on was sinful; but also, joining a Puritan congregation meant one had a moral community whose support would allow one to endure the hostility of one’s hell-bound neighbours.
另一方面,资本主义涉及不断的再投资,把一个人的财富变成创造更多财富的引擎,增加生产,扩大经营,等等。但是,韦伯建议,想象一下自己是社区中第一个这样做的人。这样做将意味着违背所有的社会期望,被几乎所有的邻居完全鄙视 —— 这些邻居也将越来越多地成为你的雇员。韦伯认为,任何能够以这种挑衅性的单一方式行事的人,“都必须是某种英雄”。他说,这就是为什么基督教的清教徒风格,如加尔文主义,使资本主义成为可能的原因。清教徒不仅认为他们可以把利润花在几乎任何东西上都是有罪的;而且,加入清教会意味着一个人有一个道德社区,其支持将使他能够忍受来自地狱邻居的敌意。
Obviously, none of this was true in an eighteenth-century Yurok village. Aboriginal Californians did not hire one another as wage labourers, lend money at interest, or invest the profits of commercial ventures to expand production. There were no ‘capitalists’ in the literal sense. What there was, however, was a remarkable cultural emphasis on private property. As Goldschmidt notes, all property, whether natural resources, money or items of wealth, was ‘privately (and for the most part individually) owned’, including fishing, hunting and gathering grounds. Individual ownership was complete, with full rights of alienation. Such a highly developed concept of property, Goldschmidt observed, requires the use of money, such that in Northwest California ‘money buys everything – wealth, resources, food, honor and wives.’19
显然,在 18 世纪的尤罗克村,这些都不是真的。加利福尼亚原住民没有相互雇佣作为工资劳动者,没有借钱付利息,也没有把商业企业的利润用于扩大生产。这里没有字面意义上的 “资本家”。然而,有的只是对私有财产的显著文化强调。正如戈德施密特所指出的,所有财产,无论是自然资源、金钱还是财富物品,都是 “私人(而且大部分是个人)拥有的”,包括捕鱼、狩猎和采集场。个人所有权是完整的,有充分的转让权。戈德施密特指出,这种高度发达的财产概念需要使用金钱,因此在西北加州,“金钱可以购买一切 —— 财富、资源、食物、荣誉和妻子。”19
This very unusual property regime corresponded to a broad ethos, which Goldschmidt compared to Weber’s ‘spirit’ of capitalism (though, one might object, it corresponds more to how capitalists like to imagine the world than to how capitalism actually works). The Yurok were what we’ve called ‘possessive individualists’. They took it for granted that we are all born equal, and that it is up to each of us to make something of ourselves through self-discipline, self-denial and hard work. What’s more, this ethos appears to have been largely applied in practice.
这种非常不寻常的财产制度对应于一种广泛的精神,戈尔德施密特将其与韦伯的资本主义 “精神” 相提并论(不过,有人可能会反对,它更对应于资本家喜欢想象的世界,而不是资本主义的实际运作方式)。尤罗克人就是我们所说的 “占有型个人主义者”。他们认为,我们生而平等是理所当然的,我们每个人都应该通过自律、自我否定和努力工作来成就自己。更重要的是,这种精神似乎在很大程度上被应用于实践。
As we’ve seen, the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast were just as industrious as those of California, and in both cases those who accumulated wealth were expected to give much of it away by sponsoring collective festivals. The underlying ethos, however, could not have been more different. Where the wealthy Yurok were expected to be modest, Kwakiutl chiefs were boastful and vainglorious; so much so that one anthropologist compared them to paranoid schizophrenics. Where wealthy Yurok made little of their ancestry, Northwest Coast households had much in common with the noble houses and dynastic estates of medieval Europe, in which a class of nobles jockeyed for position within ranks of hereditary privilege, staging dazzling banquets to enhance their reputations and secure their claims to honorific titles and heirloom treasures stretching back to the beginning of time.20
正如我们所看到的,西北海岸的原住民与加利福尼亚的原住民一样勤劳,而且在这两种情况下,那些积累了财富的人都希望通过赞助集体节日来捐出大部分财富。然而,其背后的精神面貌却不尽相同。富裕的 Yurok 人被要求谦虚,而 Kwakiutl 人的首领则夸夸其谈,虚荣心很强;以至于一位人类学家将他们比作偏执的精神分裂症患者。富裕的尤罗克人很少提及他们的祖先,而西北海岸的家庭与中世纪欧洲的贵族家庭和王朝庄园有很多共同之处,其中一个贵族阶层在世袭特权的行列中争夺地位,举办令人眼花缭乱的宴会,以提高他们的声誉,并确保他们对荣誉称号和传家宝的要求延伸到时间开始。20
It’s hard to imagine that the existence of such striking cultural differences between neighbouring populations could be completely coincidental, but it’s also extremely difficult to find any studies that even begin to address the question of how this contrast came about.21 Is it possible to see indigenous Californians and peoples of the Northwest Coast as defining themselves against each other, rather in the manner that Californians and New Yorkers do today? If so, then how much of their way of life can we really explain as being motivated by a desire to be unlike other groups of people? Here, we need to bring back our earlier discussion of schismogenesis, which we introduced to help make sense of the intellectual encounter between seventeenth-century French colonists and the Wendat people of North America’s Eastern Woodlands.
很难想象相邻人口之间存在如此明显的文化差异会是完全偶然的,但也极难找到任何研究,甚至开始解决这种对比是如何产生的问题。21是否有可能把加利福尼亚原住民和西北海岸的人民看作是相互界定的,而不是像今天的加利福尼亚人和纽约人那样?如果是这样,那么他们的生活方式有多少能被我们真正解释为是出于与其他群体不同的愿望?在这里,我们需要回到我们先前对分裂发生的讨论,我们介绍了这一讨论,以帮助理解十七世纪法国殖民者和北美东部林地的温达特人之间的思想碰撞。
Schismogenesis, you’ll recall, describes how societies in contact with each other end up joined within a common system of differences, even as they attempt to distinguish themselves from one another. Perhaps the classic historical example (in both senses of the term ‘classic’) would be the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta, in the fifth century BC . As Marshall Sahlins puts it:
你会记得,分裂发生描述了相互接触的社会如何在一个共同的差异系统中最终结合起来,即使他们试图将自己与对方区分开来。也许最经典的历史例子(在 “经典” 一词的两种意义上)是公元前五世纪的古希腊城邦雅典和斯巴达。正如马歇尔·萨林斯所说。
Dynamically interconnected, they were then reciprocally constituted … Athens was to Sparta as sea to land, cosmopolitan to xenophobic, commercial to autarkic, luxurious to frugal, democratic to oligarchic, urban to villageois, autochthonous to immigrant, logomanic to laconic: one cannot finish enumerating the dichotomies … Athens and Sparta were antitypes.22
它们在动态上相互联系,然后相互构成…… 雅典之于斯巴达,就像海洋之于陆地,世界性之于排外性,商业之于自主性,奢华之于节俭,民主之于寡头,城市之于乡村,本土之于移民,逻辑之于简练:我们无法列举出这些二分法…… 雅典和斯巴达是反类型的。22
Each society performs a mirror image of the other. In doing so, it becomes an indispensable alter ego, the necessary and ever-present example of what one should never wish to be. Might a similar logic apply to the history of foraging societies in California and on the Northwest Coast?
每个社会都扮演着另一个社会的镜像。在这样做的过程中,它成为一个不可缺少的另一个自我,成为一个人永远不应该成为的必要的和永远存在的例子。类似的逻辑是否适用于加利福尼亚和西北海岸的觅食社会的历史?
Let’s look more closely at what might be described, in Weber’s sense, as the ‘spirit’ of northern Californian foragers. At root, it was a series of ethical imperatives, in Goldschmidt’s words: ‘the moral demand to work and by extension pursuit of gain; the moral demand of self-denial; and the individuation of moral responsibility’.23 Bound up in this was a passion for individual autonomy as absolute as that of any Kalahari Bushman – even if it took a strikingly different form. Yurok men scrupulously avoided being placed in a situation of debt or ongoing obligation to anyone else. Even the collective management of resources was frowned upon; foraging grounds were individually owned and could be rented out in times of shortfall.
让我们更仔细地看看,在韦伯的意义上,什么可以被描述为加州北部觅食者的 “精神”。从根本上说,它是一系列的道德要求,用戈德施密特的话说,“劳动的道德要求和对收益的追求;自我否定的道德要求;以及道德责任的个体化。”23与此相联系的是对个人自治的热情,其绝对性不亚于任何卡拉哈里布什曼人 —— 即使它采取了惊人的不同形式。尤罗克人谨慎地避免被置于对其他人的债务或持续义务的境地。甚至对资源的集体管理也不屑一顾;觅食地是个人拥有的,在短缺的时候可以出租。
Property was sacred, and not only in the legal sense that poachers could be shot. It also had a spiritual value. Yurok men would often spend long hours meditating on money, while the highest objects of wealth – precious hides and obsidian blades displayed only at festivals – were the ultimate sacra. Yurok struck outsiders as puritanical in a literal sense as well: as Goldschmidt reports, ambitious Yurok men were ‘exhorted to abstain from any kind of indulgence – eating, sexual gratification, play or sloth’. Big eaters were considered ‘vulgar’. Young men and women were lectured on the need to eat slowly and modestly, to keep their bodies slim and lithe. Wealthy Yurok men would gather every day in sweat lodges, where an almost daily test of these ascetic values was the need to crawl headfirst through a tiny aperture that no overweight body could possibly enter. Repasts were kept bland and spartan, decoration simple, dancing modest and restrained. There were no inherited ranks or titles. Even those who did inherit wealth continued to emphasize their personal hard work, frugality and achievement; and while the rich were expected to be generous towards the less fortunate and look after their own lands and possessions, responsibilities for sharing and caring were modest in comparison with foraging societies almost anywhere else.
财产是神圣的,不仅仅是在法律意义上,偷猎者可以被枪毙。它还具有精神价值。尤罗克人经常会花很长时间冥想金钱,而最高的财富物品 —— 珍贵的皮毛和只有在节日时才展示的黑曜石刀片 —— 则是最终的神圣。尤罗克人在字面意义上也给外人留下了清规戒律的印象:正如戈德施密特报告的那样,雄心勃勃的尤罗克人被 “劝诫不要有任何形式的放纵 —— 饮食、性满足、游戏或怠惰”。大吃特吃的人被认为是 “粗俗”。年轻男子和妇女被教导需要慢慢地、适度地进食,以保持他们的身体苗条和敏捷。富裕的尤罗克人每天都会聚集在汗蒸房里,在那里,几乎每天都要对这些禁欲主义价值观进行测试,即需要头朝下爬过一个超重的身体不可能进入的小孔。饮食保持平淡和简朴,装饰简单,舞蹈谦虚而克制。没有继承的等级或头衔。即使那些继承了财富的人也继续强调他们个人的辛勤工作、节俭和成就;虽然富人被期望对不太幸运的人慷慨解囊,并照顾他们自己的土地和财产,但与几乎其他地方的觅食社会相比,分享和照顾的责任是温和的。
Northwest Coast societies, in contrast, became notorious among outside observers for the delight they took in displays of excess. They were best known to European ethnologists for the festivals called potlatch, usually held by aristocrats acceding to some new noble title (nobles would often accumulate many of these over the course of a lifetime). In these feasts they sought to display their grandeur and contempt for ordinary worldly possessions by performing magnificent feats of generosity, overwhelming their rivals with gallons of candlefish oil, berries and quantities of fatty and greasy fish. Such feasts were scenes of dramatic contests, sometimes culminating in the ostentatious destruction of heirloom copper shields and other treasures, just as in the early period of colonial contact, around the turn of the nineteenth century, they sometimes culminated in the sacrificial killing of slaves. Each treasure was unique; there was nothing that resembled money. Potlatch was an occasion for gluttony and indulgence, ‘grease feasts’ designed to leave the body shiny and fat. Nobles often compared themselves to mountains, with the gifts they bestowed rolling off them like boulders, to flatten and crush their rivals.
西北海岸社会,相反,在外部观察者中,他们因喜欢炫耀而变得臭名昭著。欧洲民族学家对他们最熟悉的是称为 potlatch 的节日,通常是由获得某种新的贵族头衔的贵族举行的(贵族在一生中往往会积累许多这样的头衔)。在这些盛宴中,他们试图展示他们的宏伟和对普通世俗财产的蔑视,表现出巨大的慷慨,用一加仑的烛鱼油、浆果和大量的脂肪和油腻的鱼来压倒他们的竞争者。这种盛宴是戏剧性的竞赛场面,有时会以破坏传家宝铜盾和其他宝物而达到高潮,就像在十九世纪初的殖民接触时期,有时会以牺牲奴隶而达到高潮。每件宝物都是独一无二的;没有任何类似于金钱的东西。Potlatch 是一个贪食和放纵的场合,“油脂盛宴” 旨在让身体变得光亮和肥胖。贵族们经常把自己比作山,他们赠送的礼物像巨石一样从他们身上滚落,以压平和压垮他们的对手。
The Northwest Coast group we know best are the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), among whom Boas conducted fieldwork. They became famous for the exuberant ornamentation of their art – their love of masks within masks – and the theatrical stage effects employed in their rituals, including fake blood, trap doors and violent clown-police. All the surrounding societies – including the Nootka, Haida and Tsimshian – appear to have shared the same broad ethos: similarly dazzling material cultures and performances could be found all the way from Alaska south to the area of Washington State. They also shared the same basic social structure, with hereditary ranks of nobles, commoners and slaves. Throughout this entire region, a 1,500-mile strip of land from the Copper River delta to Cape Mendocino, inter-group raiding for slaves was endemic, and had been for as long as anyone could recall.
我们最熟悉的西北海岸群体是 Kwakwaka'wakw(Kwakiutl),博厄斯在他们中间进行了实地考察。他们因其艺术的华丽装饰而闻名 —— 他们喜欢面具中的面具 —— 以及他们仪式中采用的戏剧性舞台效果,包括假血、陷阱门和暴力的小丑警察。所有周围的社会 —— 包括诺特卡人、海达人和齐姆希安人 —— 似乎都有相同的广泛精神:从阿拉斯加向南到华盛顿州地区,都可以发现类似的令人眼花缭乱的物质文化和表演。他们也有相同的基本社会结构,有贵族、平民和奴隶的世袭等级。在整个地区,从铜河三角洲到门多西诺角的 1500 英里长的土地上,群体间掠夺奴隶的现象十分普遍,而且从人们能记起的时候起就一直如此。
In all these societies of the Northwest Coast, nobles alone enjoyed the ritual prerogative to engage with guardian spirits, who conferred access to aristocratic titles, and the right to keep the slaves captured in raids. Commoners, including brilliant artists and craftspeople, were largely free to decide which noble house they wished to align themselves with; chiefs vied for their allegiance by sponsoring feasts, entertainment and vicarious participation in their heroic adventures. ‘Take good care of your people,’ went the elder’s advice to a young Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) chief. ‘If your people don’t like you, you’re nothing.’24
在西北海岸的所有这些社会中,只有贵族享有与守护神打交道的仪式特权,守护神赋予贵族头衔,并有权保留袭击中捕获的奴隶。平民,包括优秀的艺术家和手工艺人,基本上可以自由决定他们希望,与哪个贵族家族结盟;酋长们通过赞助宴会、娱乐和替代参与他们的英雄冒险来争取他们的效忠。“好好照顾你的人民”,长者对一个年轻的 Nuu-chah-nulth(Nootka)酋长的建议。“如果你的人民不喜欢你,你就什么都不是。”24
In many ways, the behaviour of Northwest Coast aristocrats resembles that of Mafia dons, with their strict codes of honour and patronage relations; or what sociologists speak of as ‘court societies’ – the sort of arrangement one might expect in, say, feudal Sicily, from which the Mafia derived many of its cultural codes.25 But this is emphatically not what we are taught to expect among foragers. Granted, the followers of any one of these ‘fisher-kings’ rarely numbered more than 100 or 200 people, not much larger than the size of a Californian village; in neither the Northwest Coast nor the Californian culture area were there overarching political, economic or religious organizations of any kind. But within the tiny communities that did exist, entirely different principles of social life applied.
在许多方面,西北海岸贵族的行为类似于黑手党成员的行为,他们有严格的荣誉准则和赞助关系;或者社会学家所说的 “宫廷社会” —— 人们可能期望的那种安排,例如在封建的西西里,黑手党的许多文化准则都来自那里。25但是,这显然不是我们被教导要在觅食者中期待的东西。诚然,任何一个 “渔王” 的追随者都很少超过 100 或 200 人,不比一个加利福尼亚村庄的规模大多少;在西北海岸和加利福尼亚文化区都没有任何类型的总体政治、经济或宗教组织。但在那些确实存在的小社区内,适用的社会生活原则完全不同。
All this begins to make the anthropologists’ habit of lumping Yurok notables and Kwakiutl artists together as ‘affluent foragers’ or ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ seem rather silly: the equivalent of saying a Texas oil executive and a medieval Egyptian poet were both ‘complex agriculturalists’ because they ate a lot of wheat.
所有这些开始使人类学家习惯于把尤罗克人和夸库特尔艺术家混为一谈,认为他们是 “富裕的觅食者” 或 “复杂的狩猎采集者”,这看起来相当愚蠢:相当于说一个得克萨斯州的石油主管和一个中世纪的埃及诗人都是 “复杂的农业主义者”,因为他们吃很多小麦。
But how do we explain the differences between these two culture areas? Do we start from the institutional structure (the rank system and importance of potlatch in the Northwest Coast, the role of money and private property in California), then try to understand how the prevailing ethos of each society emerges from it? Or did the ethos come first – a certain conception of the nature of humanity and its role in the cosmos – and did the institutional structures emerge from that? Or are both simply effects of a different technological adaptation to the environment?
但是,我们如何解释这两个文化区之间的差异?我们是否从制度结构入手:西北海岸的等级制度和“锅庄”(potlatch)的重要性,加利福尼亚的金钱和私有财产的作用),然后试图理解每个社会的主流精神如何从中产生?还是先有风气 —— 对人类的本质及其在宇宙中的作用的某种概念 —— 然后制度结构才由此产生?或者两者都只是对环境的不同技术适应的效果?
These are fundamental questions about the nature of society. Theorists have been batting them about for centuries, and probably will be for centuries to come. To put the matter more technically, we might ask what ultimately determines the shape a society takes: economic factors, organizational imperatives or cultural meanings and ideas? Following in the footsteps of Mauss, we might also suggest a fourth possibility. Are societies in effect self-determining, building and reproducing themselves primarily with reference to each other?
这些是关于社会性质的基本问题。几个世纪以来,理论家们一直在讨论这些问题,而且可能在未来的几个世纪里也会如此。说得更专业一点,我们可以问是什么最终决定了一个社会的形态:经济因素、组织需要还是文化意义和思想? 跟随毛斯的脚步,我们还可以提出第四种可能性。社会是否实际上是自我决定的,主要是通过相互参照来建立和繁殖自己?
There’s a lot riding on the answer we give in this particular case. The indigenous history of the Pacific Coast might not provide a very good model for what the first ‘proto-farmers’ in the Fertile Crescent were like, 10,000 years ago. But it does shed unique light on other kinds of cultural processes, which – as we explored above – have been going on for just as long, if not longer: whereby certain foraging peoples, in particular times and places, came to accept permanent inequalities, structures of domination and the loss of freedoms.
在这个特定的案例中,我们的答案有很大的影响。太平洋沿岸的原住民历史可能无法为 1 万年前新月沃土上的第一批 “原农民” 提供一个很好的模型。但它确实为其他类型的文化进程提供了独特的启示,正如我们在上文所探讨的那样,这些文化进程已经持续了同样长的时间,甚至更久:在特定的时间和地点,某些觅食者开始接受永久性的不平等、统治结构和自由的丧失。
Let’s now go through the possible explanations, one by one.
现在让我们逐一看一下可能的解释。
The most striking difference between the indigenous societies of California and the Northwest Coast is the absence, in California, of formal ranks and the institution of potlatch . The second really follows from the first. In California there were feasts and festivals, to be sure, but since there was no title system, these lacked almost all the distinctive features of potlatch: the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of cuisine, the use of ranked seating orders and serving equipment, obligatory eating of oily foods, competitive gifting, self-aggrandizing speeches, or any other public manifestations of rivalry between nobles fighting over titular privilege.26
加利福尼亚州的土著社会和西北海岸的土著社会之间最显著的区别是,在加利福尼亚没有正式的等级和锅庄制度。第二点确实是由第一点引起的。在加利福尼亚,肯定有宴会和节日,但由于没有产权制度,这些宴会几乎没有锅庄的所有特征:“高级” 和 “低级” 菜肴的划分,使用有等级的座次和服务设备,强制吃油腻的食物,竞争性的礼物,自我吹嘘的演讲,或任何其他贵族之间为争夺产权而进行竞争的公开表现。26
In many ways, the seasonal gatherings of Californian tribes seem exactly to reverse the principles of potlatch. Staple rather than luxury foods were consumed; ritual dances were playful rather than regimented or menacing, often involving the humorous transgression of social boundaries between men and women, children and elders (they seem to be one of the few occasions when the otherwise staid Yurok allowed themselves to have a bit of fun). Valuables such as obsidian blades and deer skins were never sacrificed or gifted to enemies as a challenge or insult, but carefully unwrapped and passed into the trust of temporary ‘dance leaders’, as if to underline how much their owners wished to avoid drawing undue attention to themselves.27
在许多方面,加利福尼亚部落的季节性聚会似乎完全颠覆了锅庄的原则。他们消费的是主食而不是奢侈的食物;仪式上的舞蹈是嬉戏性的,而不是规整的或有威胁性的,往往涉及到对男女之间、儿童和长者之间社会界限的幽默侵犯(这似乎是为数不多的、在其他方面很沉稳的尤罗克人允许自己有一点乐趣的场合之一)。诸如黑曜石刀片和鹿皮等贵重物品从不作为挑战或侮辱献给敌人,而是小心翼翼地拆开,交给临时的 “舞蹈领袖” 保管,似乎在强调它们的主人多么希望避免引起人们对自己的过分关注。27
Local headmen in California certainly did benefit by hosting such occasions: social connections were made, and an enhanced reputation could often mean later opportunities to make money.28 But insofar as feast sponsors could be seen as self-aggrandizing, they themselves went to great lengths to downplay their roles, and anyway, attributing a secret desire for profit to them seems reductive in the extreme, even rather insulting, considering the actual redistribution of resources that went on in Californian trade feasts and ‘deerskin dances’, and their well-documented importance in promoting solidarity between groups from neighbouring hamlets.29
加利福尼亚州的当地头人当然会从主办这种场合中受益:建立社会关系,提高声誉往往意味着以后有机会赚钱。28但是,只要宴会赞助商可以被视为自我吹嘘,他们自己就会不遗余力地淡化自己的角色,而且无论如何,考虑到加利福尼亚贸易宴会和 “鹿皮舞” 中实际发生的资源再分配,以及它们在促进邻近村庄群体之间的团结方面有据可查的重要性,将秘密的获利欲望归咎于他们似乎是极端的,甚至是相当侮辱的。29
So are we talking about the same basic institution (a ‘redistributive feast’) carried out in an entirely different spirit, or two entirely different institutions, or even, potlatch and anti-potlatch? How are we to tell? Clearly the issue is much broader, and touches on the very nature of ‘culture areas’ and what actually constitutes a threshold or boundary between them. We are looking for a key to this problem. It lies in the institution of slavery, which, as we’ve noted, was endemic on the Northwest Coast but correspondingly absent south of the Klamath River in California.
那么,我们谈论的是以完全不同的精神进行的同一基本制度(“再分配的盛宴”),还是两个完全不同的制度,甚至是,锅庄和反锅庄?我们该如何分辨?显然,这个问题要广泛得多,而且涉及到 “文化区” 的本质,以及什么实际上构成了它们之间的门槛或边界。我们正在寻找这个问题的关键。它在于奴隶制,正如我们所注意到的,奴隶制在西北海岸很普遍,但在加利福尼亚克拉玛斯河以南却相应地没有。
Slaves on the Northwest Coast were hewers of wood and drawers of water, but they were especially involved in the mass harvesting, cleaning and processing of salmon and other anadromous fish. There’s no consensus, however, on how far back the indigenous practice of slavery actually went there. The first European accounts of the region in the late eighteenth century speak of slaves, and express mild surprise in doing so, since full-fledged chattel slavery was quite unusual in other parts of aboriginal North America. These accounts suggest that perhaps a quarter of the indigenous Northwest Coast population lived in bondage – which is about equivalent to proportions found in the Roman Empire, or classical Athens, or indeed the cotton plantations of the American South. What’s more, slavery on the Northwest Coast was a hereditary status: if you were a slave, your children were also fated to be so.30
西北海岸的奴隶是伐木者和汲水者,但他们特别参与了鲑鱼和其他溯河鱼类的大量收获、清洗和加工。然而,对于土著人的奴隶制做法究竟可以追溯到多远,目前还没有共识。十八世纪末欧洲人对该地区的第一份报告提到了奴隶,并对此表示轻微的惊讶,因为成熟的动产奴隶制在北美原住民的其他地区是相当不寻常的。这些记载表明,西北海岸原住民中可能有四分之一的人生活在奴役中 —— 这与罗马帝国、古典雅典或美洲南部的棉花种植园的比例相当。更重要的是,西北海岸的奴隶制是一种世袭的地位:如果你是一个奴隶,你的孩子也注定要成为奴隶。30
Given the limitations of our sources, it’s always possible that these European accounts were describing what was, at the time, a recent innovation. Current archaeological and ethno-historical research, though, suggests that the institution of slavery goes back a very long way indeed on the Northwest Coast, many centuries before European ships began docking at Nootka Sound to trade in otter pelts and blankets.
鉴于我们资料来源的局限性,这些欧洲人的描述总是有可能是在描述当时的一种最新创新。不过,目前的考古和民族历史研究表明,奴隶制在西北海岸确实可以追溯到很久之前,在欧洲船只开始停靠诺特卡湾进行水獭皮和毛毯交易之前的许多个世纪。
It’s fiendishly difficult to ‘find slavery’ in the archaeological record, unaided by written records; but on the West Coast we can at least observe how many of the elements that later came together in the institution of slavery emerged at roughly the same time, starting around 1850 BC, in what’s called the Middle Pacific period. This is when we first observe the bulk harvesting of anadromous fish, an incredibly bounteous resource – later travellers recounted salmon runs so massive one could not see the water for the fish – but one that involved a dramatic intensification of labour demands. It’s presumably no coincidence that around this same time, we see also the first signs of warfare and the building of defensive fortifications, and expanding trade networks.31 There are also some other pointers.
在没有书面记录的情况下,要在考古记录中 “找到奴隶制” 是非常困难的;但在西海岸,我们至少可以观察到后来在奴隶制中出现的许多元素是如何在大约同一时间出现的,大约从公元前 1850 年开始,即所谓的中太平洋时期。这是我们第一次观察到大量捕捞溯河鱼类,这是一种令人难以置信的丰饶资源 —— 后来的旅行者讲述了鲑鱼的大量繁殖,人们无法看到水里的鱼 —— 但这也涉及到劳动力需求的急剧加强。在同一时期,我们也看到了战争和建造防御工事以及扩大贸易网络的最初迹象,这大概不是巧合。31还有一些其他迹象。
Cemeteries of Middle Pacific age, between 1850 BC and AD 200, reveal extreme disparities in treatments of the dead, something not seen in earlier times. At the ‘top end’, the most privileged burials exhibit formal systems of body ornamentation, and the somewhat macabre staging of corpses in seated, reclining or other fixed positions, presumably referencing a strict hierarchy of ritual postures and manners among the living. At the ‘bottom’ we see quite the other extreme: mutilation of certain individuals’ bodies, recycling of human bone to make tools and containers, and the ‘offering’ of people as grave goods (i.e. human sacrifice). The overall impression is of a wide spectrum of formalized statuses, ranging from high rank to people whose lives and deaths appear to have mattered little.32
公元前 1850 年至公元 200 年之间的中太平洋时代的墓地显示出对死者处理的极端差异,这在早期是看不到的。在 “高端”,最优越的墓葬展示了正式的身体装饰系统,以及将尸体摆成坐姿、卧姿或其他固定的姿势,这大概是指活人之间严格的仪式姿势和礼仪的等级制度。在 “底层”,我们看到了另一个极端:肢解某些人的身体,回收人骨来制作工具和容器,以及将人作为墓地物品来 “献祭”(即人祭)。总的印象是一个广泛的正式身份,从高级别的人到那些生命和死亡似乎都不重要的人。32
Turning now to California, one thing we can note straight away is the absence of all these features in correspondingly early periods. South of Cape Mendocino we seem to be dealing with a different kind of Middle Pacific – a more ‘pacific’ one, in fact. But we can’t put these differences down to a lack of contact between the two groups. On the contrary, archaeological and linguistic evidence demonstrates extensive movement of people and goods along much of the West Coast. A vibrant, canoe-borne maritime commerce already linked coastal and island societies, conveying valuables such as shell beads, copper, obsidian and a host of organic commodities across the diverse ecologies of the Pacific littoral. Various lines of evidence also point to the movement of human captives as a feature of inter-group warfare and trade. As early as 1500 BC, some parts of the shoreline around the Salish Sea were already equipped with fortifications and shelters, in apparent anticipation of raids.33
现在转向加利福尼亚,我们可以直接注意到的一件事是,在相应的早期阶段没有所有这些特征。在门多西诺角以南,我们似乎在处理一种不同的中太平洋 —— 事实上是一种更 “和平” 的中太平洋。但我们不能把这些差异归结为两个群体之间缺乏接触。相反,考古学和语言学证据表明,在西海岸的大部分地区,人员和货物都在广泛流动。一个充满活力的、以独木舟为载体的海上贸易已经将沿海和岛屿社会联系在一起,在太平洋沿岸的不同生态环境中运送贝珠、铜、黑曜石和大量有机商品等贵重物品。各种证据也表明,人类俘虏的流动是群体间战争和贸易的一个特点。早在公元前 1500 年,萨利什海周围的一些海岸线已经配备了防御工事和庇护所,显然是为了应对袭击。33
So far, we have been talking about slavery without really defining the term. This is a little unwise, because Amerindian slavery had certain specific features that make it very different from ancient Greek or Roman household slavery, let alone European plantation slavery in the Caribbean or in America’s Deep South. While slavery of any sort was a fairly unusual institution among indigenous peoples of the Americas, some of these distinctively Amerindian features were shared, at least in their broad outlines, across much of the continent, including the tropics, where the earliest Spanish sources document local forms of slavery back to the fifteenth century AD . The Brazilian anthropologist Fernando Santos-Granero has coined a term for Amerindian societies that possessed these features. He calls them ‘capturing societies’.34
到目前为止,我们一直在谈论奴隶制,却没有真正定义这个词。这有点不明智,因为美洲印第安人的奴隶制有某些特定的特征,使其与古希腊或罗马的家庭奴隶制非常不同,更不用说在加勒比海或美洲南部的欧洲种植园奴隶制了。虽然任何形式的奴隶制在美洲原住民中都是一种相当不寻常的制度,但其中一些明显的美洲印第安人特征在美洲大陆的大部分地区,包括热带地区都有,至少在其大致轮廓上是如此,在那里,最早的西班牙资料记载的当地奴隶制形式可追溯到公元 15 世纪。巴西人类学家费尔南多·桑托斯·格拉内罗为拥有这些特征的美洲印第安人社会创造了一个术语。他称它们为 “捕获社会”(capturing societies)。34
Before exploring what he means, let’s define slavery itself. What makes a slave different from a serf, a peon, captive or inmate is their lack of social ties. In legal terms, at least, a slave has no family, no kin, no community; they can make no promises and forge no ongoing connections with other human beings. This is why the English word ‘free’ is actually derived from a root meaning ‘friend’. Slaves could not have friends because they could not make commitments to others, since they were entirely under someone else’s power and their only obligation was to do exactly what their master said. If a Roman legionary was captured in battle and enslaved, then managed to escape and return home, he had to go through an elaborate process of restoring all his social relationships, including remarrying his wife, since the act of enslaving him was considered to have severed all previous relationships. The West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson has referred to this as a condition of ‘social death’.35
在探讨他的意思之前,让我们先定义一下奴隶制本身。奴隶与农奴、农民、俘虏或囚犯的不同之处在于他们缺乏社会关系。至少在法律上,奴隶没有家庭、没有亲属、没有社区;他们不能做出任何承诺,也不能与其他人类建立持续的联系。这就是为什么英语中的 “自由” 一词实际上来自于 “朋友” 的词根。奴隶不可能有朋友,因为他们不能对他人做出承诺,因为他们完全处于别人的权力之下,他们唯一的义务就是完全按照主人的要求去做。如果一个罗马军团成员在战斗中被俘并被奴役,然后设法逃脱并回家,他必须经历一个精心设计的过程来恢复他的所有社会关系,包括与妻子再婚,因为奴役他的行为被认为是切断了所有以前的关系。西印度社会学家奥兰多·帕特森将此称为 “社会死亡” 的状况。35
Unsurprisingly, the archetypical slaves are usually war captives, who are typically far from home amid people who owe them nothing. There is another practical reason for turning war captives into slaves. A slave’s master has a responsibility to keep them alive in a fit state to work. Most human beings need a good deal of care and resources, and can usually be considered a net economic loss until they are twelve or sometimes fifteen years old. It rarely makes economic sense to breed slaves – which is why, globally, slaves have so often been the product of military aggression (though many were also products of debt traps, punitive judicial decisions or banditry). Seen one way, a slave-raider is stealing the years of caring labour another society invested to create a work-capable human being.36
不出所料,典型的奴隶通常是战争俘虏,他们通常远离家乡,与那些不欠他们什么的人在一起。把战争俘虏变成奴隶还有另一个实际原因。奴隶的主人有责任让他们在适合工作的状态下活着。大多数人都需要大量的照顾和资源,通常在他们 12 岁或有时 15 岁之前都可以被认为是一种净经济损失。饲养奴隶很少有经济意义 —— 这就是为什么在全球范围内,奴隶往往是军事侵略的产物(尽管许多人也是债务陷阱、惩罚性司法裁决或强盗行为的产物)。从某种意义上说,劫奴者是在窃取另一个社会为创造一个有工作能力的人而投入的多年的关怀性劳动。36
What, then, do Amerindian ‘capturing societies’ have in common which makes them distinctive from other kinds of slave-holding societies? On the face of it, not much. And least of all their modes of subsistence, which were about as diverse as could be imagined. As Santos-Granero points out, in Northwest Amazonia the dominant peoples were sedentary horticulturalists and fishermen living along the largest rivers, who raided the nomadic hunting-gathering bands of the hinterland. By contrast, in the Paraguay River basin it was semi-itinerant hunter-gatherers who raided or subjugated village agriculturalists. In southern Florida the hegemonic groups (Calusa, in this case) were fishermen-gatherers who lived in large, permanent villages but moved seasonally to fishing and gathering sites, raiding both fishing and farming communities.37
那么,美洲印第安人的 “捕获社会” 有什么共同点,使它们与其他类型的奴隶制社会不同?从表面上看,没有什么。尤其是他们的生存方式,其多样性是可想而知的。正如桑托斯·格拉内罗所指出的,在亚马逊河西北部,主导民族是居住在最大河流沿岸的定居园艺家和渔民,他们袭击了腹地的游牧狩猎采集队。相比之下,在巴拉圭河流域,是半流动的狩猎采集者袭击或征服了乡村农业者。在佛罗里达州南部,霸权群体(这里是卡鲁萨)是渔民·采集者,他们生活在大型的永久性村庄,但季节性地移动到捕鱼和采集地点,袭击渔业和农业社区。37
Classifying these groups according to how much they farmed, fished or hunted tells us little of their actual histories. What really mattered, in terms of the ebb and flow of power and resources, was their use of organized violence to ‘feed off’ other populations. Sometimes the foraging peoples – such as the Guaicurú of the Paraguay palm savannah, or the Calusa of Florida Keys – had the upper hand militarily over their agricultural neighbours. In such cases, taking slaves and exacting tribute exempted a portion of the dominant society from basic subsistence chores, and supported the existence of leisured elites. It also supported the training of specialized warrior castes, which in turn created the means for further appropriation and further tribute.
根据他们耕种、捕鱼或狩猎的多少来对这些群体进行分类,并没有告诉我们他们的实际历史。就权力和资源的起伏而言,真正重要的是他们使用有组织的暴力来 “吸食” 其他人口。有时觅食民族 —— 如巴拉圭棕榈草原的瓜库鲁人或佛罗里达群岛的卡鲁萨人 —— 在军事上比他们的农业邻居占优势。在这种情况下,抓捕奴隶和征收贡品使统治社会的一部分人免于从事基本的生活琐事,并支持有收入的精英阶层的存在。它还支持训练专门的战士种姓,这反过来又为进一步占有和进一步进贡创造了条件。
Here, again, the idea of classifying human societies by ‘modes of subsistence’ looks decidedly naive. How, for instance, would we propose to classify foragers who consume quantities of domestic crops, exacted as tribute from nearby farming populations? Marxists, who refer to ‘modes of production’, do sometimes allow for a ‘Tributary Mode,’ but this has always been linked to the growth of agrarian states and empires, back to Book III of Marx’s Capital .38 What really needs to be theorized here is not just the mode of production practised by victims of predation, but also that of the non-producers who prey on them. Now wait. A non-productive mode of production? This sounds like a contradiction in terms. But it’s only so if we limit the meaning of ‘production’ strictly to the creation of food or goods. And maybe we shouldn’t.
在这里,按照 “生存模式” 对人类社会进行分类的想法也显得很天真。例如,我们将如何对那些消费大量国内作物的觅食者进行分类,这些作物是从附近的农业人口那里收取的贡品?提到 “生产模式” 的马克思主义者,有时确实允许 “贡品模式”,但这一直与农业国家和帝国的增长有关,可以追溯到马克思《资本论》第三卷。38这里真正需要理论化的不仅仅是掠夺的受害者所实行的生产模式,而且还有掠夺他们的非生产者的生产模式。现在等等。一个非生产性的生产方式?这听起来像是一个矛盾的说法。但只有当我们把 “生产” 的含义严格限制在创造食物或商品上时才会如此。也许我们不应该这样。
‘Capturing societies’ in the Americas considered slave-taking as a mode of subsistence in its own right, but not in the usual sense of producing calories. Raiders almost invariably insisted that slaves were captured for their life force or ‘vitality’ – vitality which was consumed by the conquering group.39 Now, you might say this is literally true: if you exploit another human being for their labour, either directly or indirectly, you are living off their energies or life force; and if they are providing you with food, you are in fact eating it. But there is slightly more going on here.
美洲的 “捕获社会” 认为捕获奴隶本身就是一种生存方式,但不是通常意义上的生产卡路里。袭击者几乎无一例外地坚持认为,捕获奴隶是为了他们的生命力或 “活力” —— 被征服的群体所消耗的活力。39现在,你可能会说这在字面上是正确的:如果你直接或间接地剥削另一个人的劳动,你就是靠他们的能量或生命力生活;如果他们为你提供食物,你实际上是在吃。但这里的情况稍有不同。
Let’s recall Amazonian ideas of ownership. You appropriate something from nature, killing or uprooting it, but then this initial act of violence is transformed into a relation of caring, as you maintain and tend what is captured. Slave-raiding was talked about in similar terms, as hunting (traditionally men’s work), and captives were likened to vanquished prey. Experiencing social death, they would come to be regarded as something more like ‘pets’. While being re-socialized in their captors’ households they had to be nurtured, cooked for, fed and instructed in the proper ways of civilization; in short, domesticated (these tasks were usually women’s work). If the socialization was completed, the captive ceased to be a slave. However, captives could sometimes be kept suspended in social death, as part of a permanent pool of victims awaiting their actual, physical death. Typically they would be killed at collective feasts (akin to the Northwest Coast potlatch) presided over by ritual specialists, and this would sometimes result in the eating of enemy flesh.40
让我们回顾一下亚马逊人的所有权观念。你从自然界占有某样东西,杀死或拔掉它,但随后这种最初的暴力行为被转化为一种关怀的关系,因为你维护和照料所捕获的东西。掠夺奴隶是以类似的术语谈论的,就像狩猎(传统上是男人的工作),俘虏被比喻为被征服的猎物。经历了社会死亡,他们将被视为更像 “宠物” 的东西。当他们在俘虏的家庭中被重新社会化时,他们必须被培养,被烹饪,被喂养,并被指导以适当的文明方式;总之,被驯化(这些任务通常是妇女的工作)。如果社会化的工作完成了,俘虏就不再是奴隶。然而,俘虏有时会在社会死亡中被悬空,成为等待他们真正身体死亡的永久受害者的一部分。通常情况下,他们会在由仪式专家主持的集体宴会(类似于西北海岸的锅庄)上被杀死,这有时会导致吃敌人的肉。40
All this may seem exotic. However, it echoes the way exploited people everywhere and throughout history tend to feel about their situation: their bosses, or landlords, or superiors are blood-sucking vampires, and they are treated at best as pets and at worst as cattle. It’s just that in the Americas, a handful of societies enacted those relationships in a quite literal fashion. The more important point, concerning ‘modes of production’ or ‘modes of subsistence’, is that this kind of exploitation often took the form of ongoing relations between societies. Slavery almost always tends to do this, since imposing ‘social death’ on people whose biological relatives speak the same language as you and can easily travel to where you live will always create problems.
这一切可能看起来很奇特。然而,它呼应了历史上各地被剥削者对自己处境的感受:他们的老板、地主或上级是吸血的吸血鬼,他们最好被当作宠物,最坏被当作牲口。只是在美洲,少数社会以一种相当直白的方式颁布了这些关系。关于 “生产模式” 或 “生存模式”,更重要的一点是,这种剥削往往采取社会之间持续关系的形式。奴隶制几乎总是倾向于这样做,因为将 “社会死亡” 强加给那些其生物亲属与你说同样的语言并能轻易前往你居住地的人,总是会产生问题。
Let’s recall how some of the first European travellers to the Americas compared ‘savage’ males to noblemen back home – because, like these noblemen, they dedicated almost all their time to politics, hunting, raiding and waging war on neighbouring groups. A German observer in 1548 spoke of Arawakan villagers of the Grand Chaco in Paraguay as serfs of Guaicurú foragers, ‘in the same way as German rustics are with respect to their lords’. The implication was that little really separates a Guaicurú warrior from a Swabian feudal baron, who likely spoke French at home, feasted regularly on wild game and lived off the labour of German-speaking peasants, even though he had never touched a plough. At what point, we might then ask, were the Guaicurú, who lived amid piles of maize, manioc (cassava) and other agricultural products delivered as tribute, as well as slaves secured in raids on societies even further distant, no longer simply ‘hunter-gatherers’ (especially if they were also hunting and gathering other humans)?
让我们回顾一下,一些最早来到美洲的欧洲旅行者是如何将 “野蛮人” 男性与家乡的贵族相提并论的 —— 因为他们与这些贵族一样,几乎将所有的时间都用于政治、狩猎、袭击和向邻近的群体发动战争。1548 年,一位德国观察员谈到巴拉圭大查科地区的阿拉瓦卡人村民是瓜伊库鲁人的农奴,“就像德国乡下人对他们的领主一样”。意思是说,瓜库鲁战士和斯瓦比亚封建男爵之间没有什么真正的区别,后者很可能在家里讲法语,经常吃野味,靠讲德语的农民的劳动生活,尽管他从来没有碰过犁。那么,我们可能会问,生活在成堆的玉米、木薯和其他作为贡品的农产品中的瓜库鲁人,以及在对更遥远的社会的袭击中获得的奴隶,在什么时候不再是简单的 “狩猎·采集者”(尤其是如果他们也在狩猎和采集其他人类的话)?
True, crops were sent as tribute from nearby conquered villages, but tributary villages also sent servants, and raids on villages further out tended to concentrate on enslaving women, who could serve as concubines, nursemaids and domestics – allowing Guaicurú ‘princesses’, their bodies often completely covered with intricate tattoos and spiral designs painted on daily by their domestics, to devote their days to leisure. Early Spanish commentators always remarked that Guaicurú treated their slaves with care and even tenderness, almost exactly as they did their pet parrots and dogs,41 but what was really going on here? If slavery is the theft of labour that other societies invest in bringing up children, and the main purpose to which slaves were put was caring for children, or attending to and grooming a leisure class, then, paradoxically, the main objective of slave-taking for the ‘capturing society’ seems to have been to increase its internal capacity for caring labour. What was ultimately being produced here, within Guaicurú society, were certain kinds of people: nobles, princesses, warriors, commoners, servants, and so on.42
的确,附近被征服的村庄会送来农作物作为贡品,但支流村庄也会送来仆人,对更远的村庄的袭击往往集中在奴役妇女上,她们可以充当小妾、保姆和家政服务员 —— 这使得瓜库鲁的 “公主” 们可以将自己的身体完全覆盖在复杂的纹身和家政服务员每天绘制的螺旋形图案上,把日子过成休闲。早期的西班牙评论家总是说,瓜库鲁人对待他们的奴隶很细心,甚至很温柔,几乎和他们对待宠物鹦鹉和狗一模一样。41但在这里,到底发生了什么?如果奴隶制是对其他社会在抚养儿童方面投入的劳动的偷窃,而奴隶被投入的主要目的是照顾儿童,或照顾和梳理休闲阶层,那么,矛盾的是,对 “捕获社会” 来说,捕获奴隶的主要目的似乎是增加其内部的照顾性劳动能力。在瓜库鲁社会中,最终被生产出来的是某些类型的人:贵族、公主、战士、平民、仆人,等等。42
What needs emphasizing – since it will become extremely important as our story unfolds – is the profound ambivalence, or perhaps we might better say double-edged-ness, of these caring relationships. Amerindian societies typically referred to themselves by some term that can be roughly translated as ‘human beings’ – most of the tribal names traditionally applied to them by Europeans are derogatory terms used by their neighbours (‘Eskimo’, for example, means ‘people who don’t cook their fish’, and ‘Iroquois’ is derived from an Algonkian term meaning ‘vicious killers’). Almost all these societies took pride in their ability to adopt children or captives – even from among those whom they considered the most benighted of their neighbours – and, through care and education, turn them into what they considered to be proper human beings. Slaves, it follows, were an anomaly: people who were neither killed nor adopted, but who hovered somewhere in between; abruptly and violently suspended in the midpoint of a process that should normally lead from prey to pet to family. As such, the captive as slave becomes trapped in the role of ‘caring for others’, a non-person whose work is largely directed towards enabling those others to become persons, warriors, princesses, ‘human beings’ of a particularly valued and special kind.
需要强调的是 —— 因为随着我们故事的展开,它将变得极其重要 —— 是这些关爱关系的深刻的矛盾性,或许我们可以说是双刃剑。美洲印第安人社会通常用一些可以粗略翻译为 “人类” 的术语来称呼自己 —— 欧洲人传统上对他们使用的大多数部落名称都是他们的邻居使用的贬义词(例如,“爱斯基摩人” 意味着 “不煮鱼的人”,而 “易洛魁人” 则来自阿尔冈克人的术语,意思是 “邪恶的杀人者”)。几乎所有这些社会都为他们有能力收养儿童或俘虏而感到自豪 —— 甚至是从那些他们认为最不幸的邻居中收养的 —— 并且通过照顾和教育,把他们变成他们认为合适的人。由此可见,奴隶是一种反常现象:他们既没有被杀害,也没有被收养,而是徘徊在两者之间;在一个通常应该从猎物到宠物再到家庭的过程中,突然被暴力地中止。因此,作为奴隶的俘虏被困在 “照顾他人” 的角色中,一个非人,其工作主要是为了使这些人成为人,战士,公主,一个特别有价值和特殊的 “人”。
As these examples show, if we want to understand the origins of violent domination in human societies, this is precisely where we need to look. Mere acts of violence are passing; acts of violence transformed into caring relations have a tendency to endure. Now that we have a clearer idea of what Amerindian slavery actually involved, let us return to the Pacific Coast of North America and try to understand some of the specific conditions that made chattel slavery so prevalent on the Northwest Coast, and so unusual in California. We’ll start with a piece of oral history, an old story.
正如这些例子所示,如果我们想了解人类社会中暴力统治的起源,这正是我们需要寻找的地方。单纯的暴力行为是过眼云烟;转化为关爱关系的暴力行为则有持续存在的趋势。现在我们对美洲印第安人的奴隶制实际涉及的内容有了更清楚的认识,让我们回到北美的太平洋海岸,并尝试了解使动产奴隶制在西北海岸如此盛行,而在加利福尼亚如此不寻常的一些具体条件。我们将从一段口述历史开始,一个古老的故事。
The story we’re about to recount is first attested in 1873 by the geographer A. W. Chase. Chase claims it was related to him by people of the Chetco Nation of Oregon. It concerns the origins of the word ‘Wogie’ (pronounced ‘Wâgeh’), which across much of the coastal region was an indigenous term for white settlers. The story didn’t really register among scholars; it was repeated a couple of times in the following half-century or so, but otherwise that was it. Yet this long-overlooked story contains some precious gems of information, especially about indigenous attitudes to slavery, at precisely the interface between California and the Northwest Coast that we’ve been exploring.
我们要讲述的故事是由地理学家 A·W·契斯在 1873 年首次证实的。切斯称这是俄勒冈州切特科部落的人告诉他的。它涉及到 “Wogie”(发音为 “Wâgeh”)这个词的起源,在沿海地区的大部分地区,这个词是对白人定居者的一个土著术语。这个故事并没有在学者中得到真正的认可;在随后的半个多世纪里,它被重复了几次,但除此之外就没有了。然而,这个长期被忽视的故事包含了一些珍贵的信息,特别是关于原住民对奴隶制的态度,而这恰恰是我们一直在探索的加利福尼亚和西北海岸之间的交汇点。
Barely a handful of Chetco exist today. Originally dominating the southern shoreline of Oregon, they were largely wiped out in genocidal massacres carried out by invading settlers in the mid nineteenth century. By the 1870s, a small number of survivors were living in the Siletz Reservation, now in Lincoln County. This is what their ancestors told Chase about their origins and where they had come from:
今天几乎没有几个切特科人存在。他们最初在俄勒冈州的南部海岸线上占主导地位,但在十九世纪中期入侵的定居者进行的种族灭绝式的大屠杀中,他们基本上被消灭了。到 19 世纪 70 年代,少数幸存者生活在西利茨保留地,即现在的林肯县。这是他们的祖先告诉契斯的关于他们的起源和他们的来历。
The Chetkos say that, many seasons ago, their ancestors came in canoes from the far north, and landed at the river’s mouth. They found two tribes in possession, one a warlike race, resembling themselves; these they soon conquered and exterminated. The other was a diminutive people, of an exceedingly mild disposition, and white. These called themselves, or were called by the new-comers, ‘Wogies.’ They were skillful in the manufacture of baskets, robes, and canoes, and had many methods of taking game and fish which were unknown to the invaders. Refusing to fight, the Wogies were made slaves of, and kept at work to provide food and shelter and articles of use for the more warlike race, who waxed very fat and lazy. One night, however, after a grand feast, the Wogies packed up and fled, and were never more seen. When the first white men appeared, the Chetkos supposed that they were the Wogies returned. They soon found out their mistake, however, but retained among themselves the appellation for the white men, who are known as Wogies by all the coast tribes in the vicinity.43
切特科人说,许多年前,他们的祖先乘坐独木舟从遥远的北方来到这里,并在河口登陆。他们发现有两个部落,一个是好战的种族,与他们自己相似;他们很快就征服并消灭了这些部落。另一个是一个矮小的民族,性格极其温和,是白人。这些人自称,或被新来的人称为 “Wogies”。他们善于制造篮子、长袍和独木舟,并有许多入侵者不知道的捕猎和捕鱼方法。Wogies 人拒绝战斗,他们被当作奴隶,一直在工作,为更善于战斗的种族提供食物和住所以及使用的物品,他们变得非常肥胖和懒惰。然而,有一天晚上,在一场盛大的宴会之后,Wogies 人收拾东西逃走了,再也没有人看到他们。当第一批白人出现时,切特科人认为他们是 Wogies 人回来了。然而,他们很快就发现了自己的错误,但在他们中间保留了对白人的称呼,附近的所有海岸部落都把他们称为 Wogies。43
The tale might seem unassuming, but there’s a lot packed into it. That the survivors of a forager group on the Oregon coast should narrate Euro-American colonization as an act of historical vengeance is unsurprising.44 Neither is there anything implausible about an indigenous slave-holding society migrating south by sea into new territory, at some remote time, and either subjugating or killing the autochthonous inhabitants.45
这个故事看似平淡无奇,但其中包含了很多内容。俄勒冈州海岸的一个觅食者群体的幸存者将欧美殖民化说成是一种历史复仇行为,这并不令人惊讶。44在某个遥远的年代,一个拥有奴隶的本土社会通过海路向南迁移到新的领土,并征服或杀害本土居民,这也没有什么不可信的。45
Similarly to the Guaicurú, the aggressors appear to have made a point of subduing people with skills they themselves lacked. What the ‘proto-Chetco’ acquired was not just physical brawn (‘Wogie labour’) or even care, but the accumulated savoir-faire of a hunter-fisher-forager people not entirely unlike themselves and, according to the story at least, in many respects more capable.
与瓜库鲁人类似,侵略者似乎也是以他们自己缺乏的技能来征服人们。原切特科人 “获得的不仅仅是体力(Wogie 的劳动),甚至是关心,而是一个与他们自己并不完全不同的狩猎·捕鱼·觅食民族所积累的聪明才智,至少根据这个故事,他们在许多方面更有能力。
Another intriguing feature of this story is its setting. The Chetco lived in the intermediate zone between our two major culture regions, precisely where one would imagine the institution of slavery to be most explicitly debated and contested. And indeed, the story has a distinctly ethical flavour, as if it were a cautionary tale aimed at anyone tempted to render others slaves, or acquire wealth and leisure through raiding. Having forced their victims into servitude, growing ‘fat and lazy’ on the proceeds, it’s the Chetcos’ newfound sloth that makes them unable to pursue the fleeing Wogies. The Wogies come out of the whole affair on top by virtue of their pacifism, industriousness, craft skills and capacity for innovation; indeed, they get to make a lethal return – in spirit, at least – as Euro-American settlers equipped with ‘guns, germs, and steel’.46
这个故事的另一个耐人寻味的特点是其背景。切特科人生活在我们两个主要文化区域之间的中间地带,正是人们想象中对奴隶制进行最明确辩论和争论的地方。事实上,这个故事具有明显的伦理色彩,就像一个警告故事,针对的是任何试图使他人成为奴隶,或通过掠夺获得财富和休闲的人。在强迫他们的受害者成为奴隶,并在收益上变得 “肥胖和懒惰” 之后,切特科的新发现的懒惰使他们无法追击逃离的 Wogies。Wogies 凭借他们的和平主义、勤劳、工艺技能和创新能力在整个事件中脱颖而出;事实上,他们得到了致命的回报 —— 至少在精神上 —— 作为配备了 “枪支、细菌和钢铁” 的欧美定居者。46
Taking this into account, the tale of the Wogies points to some intriguing possibilities. Most importantly, it indicates that the rejection of slavery among groups in the region between California and the Northwest Coast had strong ethical and political dimensions. And indeed, once one starts looking, it’s not hard to find further evidence for this. The Yurok, for example, did hold a small number of slaves, mainly debt peons or captives not yet ransomed by their relatives. But their legends evince a strong disapproval. To take one example, a heroic protagonist makes his fame by defeating a maritime adventurer named Le’mekwelolmei, who would pillage and enslave passing travellers. After defeating him in combat, our hero rejects his appeal to join forces:
考虑到这一点,Wogies 人的故事指出了一些令人感兴趣的可能性。最重要的是,它表明在加利福尼亚和西北海岸之间的地区,各群体对奴隶制的拒绝具有强烈的伦理和政治色彩。而且,一旦开始寻找,就不难找到进一步的证据。例如,尤罗克人确实持有少量的奴隶,主要是债务人或尚未被其亲属赎回的俘虏。但他们的传说显示出强烈的反对意见。举个例子,一个英雄的主人公通过打败一个名叫 Le'mekwelolmei 的海上冒险家而成名,这个冒险家会掠夺和奴役过往的旅行者。在战斗中击败他后,我们的英雄拒绝了他的联合呼吁。
‘No, I do not want to be like you, summoning boats to the shore, seizing them and their cargo, and making people slaves. As long as you live you will never be tyrannous again, but like other men.’
“不,我不想像你一样,把船召到岸边,扣押它们和它们的货物,让人们成为奴隶。只要你活着,你就不会再暴虐,而是像其他人一样。”
‘I will do so,’ said Le’mekwelolmei.
“我将这样做”,Le'mekwelolmei 说。
‘If you return to your former ways, I will kill you. Perhaps I should take you for a slave now, but I will not. Stay in your home and keep what is yours and leave people alone.’ To the slaves who stood about nearly filling the river bank, he said, ‘Go to your homes. You are free now.’
“如果你回到你以前的方式,我会杀了你。也许我现在应该把你当作奴隶,但我不会。留在你的家里,保留属于你的东西,不要打扰别人。” 对那些几乎站满了河岸的奴隶,他说:“回你们的家吧。你们现在是自由的。”
The people who had been enslaved surrounded him, weeping and thanking him and wanting to drag his boat back to the water. ‘No, I will drag it myself,’ he said, and then with one hand he lifted it to the river. So the freed people all scattered, some down-river and some upriver to their homes.47
被奴役的人们围着他,哭泣着感谢他,想把他的船拖回水中。他说:“不,我自己来拖”,然后用一只手把它举到河边。于是,获得自由的人们都散开了,有的顺流而下,有的逆流而上,回到自己的家。47
Northwest Coast-style maritime raiding was in no sense celebrated, to say the least.
至少可以说,西北海岸式的海上突袭在某种意义上并不值得称道。
Still, one might ask: might there not be a more straightforward explanation for the prevalence of slavery on the Northwest Coast, and its absence further south? It’s easy to express moral disapproval of a practice if there’s not much economic incentive to practise it anyway. An ecological determinist would almost necessarily argue this, and in fact there is a body of literature that makes just such an argument for the Pacific Coast – and it’s about the only literature that does actually take on the question of why different coastal societies looked so different in the first place. This is a branch of behavioural ecology called ‘optimal foraging theory’. Its proponents make some interesting points. Before proceeding, then, let us consider them.
不过,人们可能会问:对于西北海岸普遍存在的奴隶制,以及更南边没有奴隶制的情况,可能没有更直接的解释吗?如果没有太多的经济动机来实行一种做法,那么对这种做法表示道德上的反对是很容易的。一个生态决定论者几乎必然会这样论证,事实上,有一组文献对太平洋海岸进行了这样的论证 —— 这也是唯一的文献,它确实对为什么不同的沿海社会看起来如此不同的问题进行了探讨。这是行为生态学的一个分支,称为 “最佳觅食理论”。其支持者提出了一些有趣的观点。在继续之前,让我们考虑一下这些观点。
Optimal foraging theory is a style of predictive modelling that originates in the study of non-human species such as starlings, honeybees or fish. Applied to humans, it typically frames behaviour in terms of economic rationality, i.e.: ‘foragers will design their hunting and collecting strategies with the intention of obtaining a maximum return in calories, for a minimum outlay of labour.’ This is what behavioural ecologists call a ‘cost-benefit’ calculation. First you figure out how foragers ought to act, if they are trying to be as efficient as possible. Then you examine how they do in fact act. If it doesn’t correspond to the optimum foraging strategy, something else must be going on.
最佳觅食理论是一种预测模型,起源于对非人类物种的研究,如椋鸟、蜜蜂或鱼类。应用到人类身上,它通常从经济理性的角度来框定行为,即:“觅食者将设计他们的狩猎和采集策略,目的是以最小的劳动支出获得最大的卡路里回报”。这就是行为生态学家所说的 “成本·效益” 计算。首先,你要弄清楚,如果觅食者试图尽可能地有效,他们应该如何行动。然后你检查他们事实上是如何行动的。如果它不符合最佳的觅食策略,那么一定是发生了别的事情。
From this perspective, the behaviour of indigenous Californians was far from optimal. As we’ve noted, they relied primarily on gathering acorns and pine nuts as staples. In a region as bounteous as California, there’s no obvious reason to do this. Acorns and pine nuts offer tiny individual food packages and require a great deal of labour to process. To render them edible, most varieties require the back-breaking work of leaching and grinding to be carried out, to remove toxins and release nutrients. Nut yields can vary dramatically from one season to the next, a risky pattern of boom and bust. At the same time, fish are found in abundance from the Pacific Coast inland at least as far as the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. Fish are both more nutritious and more reliable than nuts. Despite this, salmon and other aquatic foods generally came second to tree crops in Californian diets, and this seems to have been the case long before the arrival of Europeans.48
从这个角度来看,加州土著人的行为远非最佳。正如我们所指出的,他们主要依靠采集橡子和松子作为主食。在加利福尼亚这样一个富饶的地区,没有明显的理由这样做。橡子和松子提供微小的单独食物包,需要大量的劳动力来加工。为了使它们可以食用,大多数品种需要进行艰苦的浸出和研磨工作,以去除毒素和释放营养物质。坚果的产量在不同的季节会有很大的变化,这是一种有风险的繁荣和衰退模式。同时,从太平洋海岸向内陆至少到萨克拉门托河和圣华金河的汇合处,都有大量的鱼。鱼类比坚果更有营养,也更可靠。尽管如此,在加利福尼亚人的饮食中,鲑鱼和其他水生食物通常排在树木作物之后,而且在欧洲人到来之前,情况似乎早已如此。48
In terms of ‘optimal foraging theory’, then, the behaviour of Californians simply makes no sense. Salmon can be harvested and processed in great quantities on an annual basis, and they provide oil and fats as well as protein. In terms of cost-benefit calculations, the peoples of the Northwest Coast are eminently more sensible than Californians, and have been for hundreds or even thousands of years.49 Granted, they also had little choice, since nut-gathering was never a serious option on the Northwest Coast (the main forest species there are conifers). It’s also true that Northwest Coast peoples enjoyed a greater range of fish than Californians, including eulachon (candlefish), intensively exploited for its oil, which was both a staple food and a core ingredient in ‘grease feasts,’ where nobles ladled great quantities of this stuff on to the burning hearth, and occasionally on to one another. But the Californians did have a choice.
那么,就 “最佳觅食理论” 而言,加利福尼亚人的行为根本没有意义。鲑鱼可以每年大量收获和加工,它们提供油和脂肪以及蛋白质。就成本效益的计算而言,西北海岸的人民显然比加利福尼亚人更明智,而且几百年甚至几千年来都是如此。49 当然,他们也没有什么选择,因为采集坚果在西北海岸从来不是一个严肃的选择(那里的主要森林物种是针叶树)。另外,西北海岸人确实比加利福尼亚人享有更多的鱼类,包括因油而被大量开采的 Eulachon(烛鱼),它既是主食,也是 “油宴” 的核心成分,贵族们将大量的这种东西舀到燃烧的壁炉上,偶尔也舀到彼此身上。但加利福尼亚人确实有一个选择。
California, then, is an ecological puzzle. Most of its indigenous inhabitants appear to have prided themselves on their hard work, clear-sighted practicality and prudence in monetary affairs – quite unlike the wild and excessive self-image of Northwest Coast chiefs, who liked to boast that they ‘didn’t care about anything’ – but as it turns out, the Californians were the ones basing their entire regional economy on apparently irrational choices. Why did they choose to intensify the use of oak groves and pinion stands when so many rich fisheries were available?
那么,加利福尼亚是一个生态学难题。其大多数原住居民似乎都为自己的辛勤工作、清晰的实用性和对货币事务的谨慎而感到自豪 —— 与西北海岸酋长的狂野和过度的自我形象完全不同,他们喜欢吹嘘自己 “什么都不在乎” —— 但事实证明,加利福尼亚人是将其整个区域经济建立在明显不合理的选择之上的人。既然有这么多丰富的渔业资源,他们为什么还要选择加强对橡树林和松树林的利用?
Ecological determinists sometimes try to solve the puzzle by appealing to food security. Brigands like Le’mekwelolmei might have been seen as villains, at least in some quarters, but brigands, they argue, will always exist. And what is more attractive to thieves and raiders than stockpiles of already processed, easy-to-transport food? But dead fish, for reasons that should be obvious to all of us, cannot be left lying around. They must be either eaten immediately or cleaned, filleted, dried and smoked to prevent infestation. On the Northwest Coast these tasks were completed like clockwork in the spring and summer, because they were critical for the group’s physical survival, and also its social survival in the competitive feasting exploits of the winter season.50
生态决定论者有时试图通过呼吁粮食安全来解决这个难题。像 Le'mekwelolmei 这样的强盗可能被视为恶棍,至少在某些方面是这样,但他们认为,强盗永远存在。还有什么比储存已经加工好的、易于运输的食物对小偷和袭击者更有吸引力?但是,死鱼,由于对我们所有人来说都是显而易见的原因,不能随意丢弃。它们必须被立即吃掉,或者被清洗、切片、晒干和熏制,以防止虫害。在西北海岸,这些工作像钟表一样在春夏两季完成,因为它们对群体的物质生存至关重要,而且在冬季的竞争性宴请活动中也是社会生存的关键。50
In the technical language of behavioural ecology, fish are ‘front-loaded’. You have to do most of the work of preparation right away. As a result, one could argue that a decision to rely heavily on fish – while undoubtedly sensible in purely nutritional terms – is also weaving a noose for one’s own neck. It meant investing in the creation of a storable surplus of processed and packaged foods (not just preserved meat, but also fats and oils), which also meant creating an irresistible temptation for plunderers.51 Acorns and nuts, on the other hand, present neither such risks nor such temptations. They are ‘back-loaded’. Harvesting them was a simple and fairly leisurely affair,52 and, crucially, there was no need for processing prior to storage. Instead most of the hard work took place only just before consumption: leaching and grinding to make porridges, cakes and biscuits. (This is the very opposite of smoked fish, which you don’t even have to cook if you don’t want to.)
用行为生态学的技术语言来说,鱼是 “前装”(front-loaded)的。你必须马上做大部分的准备工作。因此,人们可以说,严重依赖鱼类的决定 —— 虽然从纯粹的营养角度看无疑是明智的 —— 也是在为自己的脖子编织绞索。这意味着投资于创造可储存的过剩的加工和包装食品(不仅仅是腌制的肉类,还有脂肪和油),这也意味着对掠夺者产生了不可抗拒的诱惑。51另一方面,橡子和坚果既没有这种风险,也没有这种诱惑。它们是 “后装” 的(back-loaded)。收获它们是一件简单和相当悠闲的事情。52而且,关键是,在储存之前不需要加工。相反,大部分艰苦的工作只是在消费前才发生:浸出和研磨,以制作粥、蛋糕和饼干。(这与烟熏鱼截然相反,如果你不愿意,你甚至不需要烹饪。)
So there was little point in raiding a store of raw acorns. As a result, there was also no real incentive to develop organized ways of defending these stores against potential raiders. One can begin to see the logic here. Salmon-fishing and acorn-gathering simply have very different practical affordances, which over the long term might be expected to produce very different sorts of societies: one warlike and prone to raiding (and after you have made off with the food, it’s not much of a leap to begin carrying off prisoners as well), the other essentially peaceful.53 Northwest Coast societies, then, were warlike because they simply didn’t have the option of relying on a war-proof staple food.
因此,抢夺生橡子的仓库没有什么意义。因此,也没有真正的动力去发展有组织的方式来保卫这些仓库,以抵御潜在的袭击者。人们可以开始看到这里的逻辑。捕捞鲑鱼和采集橡树果实具有非常不同的实用性,从长远来看,这可能会产生非常不同的社会类型:一个是好战的,容易遭到袭击(在你获得食物后,开始带走囚犯也不是什么大问题),另一个基本上是和平的。53那么,西北海岸的社会是好战的,因为他们根本没有选择依靠防战的主食。
It’s certainly an elegant theory, quite clever and satisfying in its own way.54 The problem is it just doesn’t seem to match up to historical reality. The first and most obvious difficulty is that the capture of dried fish, or foodstuffs of any kind, was never a significant aim of Northwest Coast inter-group raiding. To put it bluntly, there’s only so many smoked fish one can pile up in a war canoe. And carrying bulk products overland was even more difficult: pack animals being entirely absent in this part of the Americas, everything had to be carried by human beings, and on a long trip a slave is likely to eat about as much as they can carry. The main aim of raids was always to capture people, never food.55 But this was also one of the most densely populated regions of North America. Where, then, did this hunger for people come from? These are precisely the kind of questions that ‘optimal foraging theory’ and other ‘rational-choice’ approaches seem utterly unable to answer.
这当然是一个优雅的理论,相当聪明,而且以自己的方式令人满意。54问题是,它似乎与历史现实不相符。第一个也是最明显的困难是,捕获鱼干或任何种类的食品,从来都不是西北海岸群体间突袭的重要目的。直截了当地说,一个人在战船上能堆积的熏鱼只有那么多。而从陆路运送大宗产品则更加困难:在美洲的这一地区完全没有驮运动物,所有东西都必须由人携带,而在长途旅行中,奴隶吃的东西很可能和他们能携带的一样多。袭击的主要目的始终是为了抓人,而不是抓食物。55但这里也是北美人口最稠密的地区之一。那么,这种对人的饥饿感从何而来?这些正是 “最佳觅食理论” 和其他 “理性选择” 方法似乎完全无法回答的问题。
In fact, the ultimate causes of slavery didn’t lie in environmental or demographic conditions, but in Northwest Coast concepts of the proper ordering of society; and these, in turn, were the result of political jockeying by different sectors of the population who, as everywhere, had somewhat different perspectives on what a proper society should be. The simple reality is that there was no shortage of working hands in Northwest Coast households. But a good proportion of those hands belonged to aristocratic title holders who felt strongly that they should be exempted from menial work. They might hunt manatees or killer whales, but it was inconceivable for them to be seen building weirs or gutting fish. First-hand accounts show this often became an issue in the spring and summer, when the only limits on fish-harvesting were the number of hands available to process and preserve the catch. Rules of decorum prevented nobles from joining in, while low-ranking commoners (‘perpetual transients’, as one ethnographer called them)56 would instantly defect to a rival household if pressed too hard or called upon too often.
事实上,奴隶制的最终原因并不在于环境或人口条件,而在于西北海岸对社会适当秩序的概念;而这些又是不同阶层的人进行政治角逐的结果,他们在任何地方都对适当的社会应该是什么有一些不同的看法。一个简单的现实是,西北海岸的家庭并不缺乏劳动者。但这些人中有相当一部分属于贵族头衔持有者,他们强烈认为自己应该被免除琐碎的工作。他们可以猎杀海牛或虎鲸,但无法想象他们会被看到建造围堰或给鱼开膛破肚。第一手资料显示,这在春夏之交经常成为一个问题,当时对捕鱼的唯一限制是有多少人可以处理和保存渔获物。礼仪规则阻止了贵族的加入,而低级别的平民(一位民族志学者称他们为 “永久的过渡者”)则56如果被逼得太紧或被要求的次数太多,他们会立即投奔对手的家庭。
In other words, aristocrats probably did feel that commoners should be working like slaves for them, but commoners had other opinions. Many were happy to devote long hours to art, but considered fish runs quite another matter. Indeed, the relation between title-holding nobles and their dependants seems to have been under constant negotiation. Sometimes it was not entirely clear who was serving whom:
换句话说,贵族们可能确实觉得平民应该像奴隶一样为他们工作,但平民们却有其他看法。许多人乐于为艺术献出漫长的时间,但认为养鱼是另一回事。事实上,拥有头衔的贵族和他们的家属之间的关系似乎一直在进行协商。有时并不完全清楚谁在为谁服务。
High rank was a birthright but a noble could not rest on his laurels. He had to ‘keep up’ his name through generous feasting, potlatching, and general open-handedness. Otherwise he ran the risk not only of losing face but in extreme cases actually losing his position, or even his life. Swadesh tells of a despotic [Nootka] chief who was murdered for ‘robbing’ his commoners by demanding all of his fishermen’s catch, rather than the usual tributary portion. His successor outdid himself in generosity, saying when he caught a whale, ‘You people cut it up and everyone take one chunk; just leave the little dorsal fin for me.’57
高等级是与生俱来的权利,但一个贵族不能满足于他的荣誉。他必须通过慷慨的盛宴、锅碗瓢盆和普遍的开放性来 “保持” 他的名声。否则,他不仅会有丢脸的风险,而且在极端情况下还会失去地位,甚至是生命。Swadesh 讲述了一个专制的诺特卡酋长被谋杀的故事,他要求渔民提供所有的渔获物,而不是通常的支流部分,从而 “抢劫” 了他的平民。他的继任者比他自己更慷慨,当他捕到一条鲸鱼时说:“你们把它切开,每个人拿一大块;把小背鳍留给我。”57
The result, from the nobles’ point of view, was a perennial shortage, not of labour as such but of controllable labour at key times of year. This was the problem to which slavery addressed itself. And such were the immediate causes, which made ‘harvesting people’ from neighbouring clans no less essential to the aboriginal economy of the Northwest Coast than constructing weirs, clam gardens or terraced root plots.58
从贵族的角度来看,其结果是常年短缺,不是劳动力本身,而是在一年中的关键时期可控的劳动力。这就是奴隶制要解决的问题。而这些都是直接原因,这使得从邻近部族 “收割人” 对西北海岸原住民经济的重要性不亚于建造围堰、蛤蜊园或梯田根地。58
So we must conclude that ecology does not explain the presence of slavery on the Northwest Coast. Freedom does. Title-holding aristocrats, locked in rivalry with one another, simply lacked the means to compel their own subjects to support their endless games of magnificence. They were forced to look abroad.
因此,我们必须得出结论,生态学并不能解释西北海岸存在的奴隶制。自由才是。拥有所有权的贵族,在相互竞争中被锁定,根本没有办法强迫自己的臣民支持他们无休止的华丽游戏。他们被迫将目光投向国外。
What, then, of California?
那么,加利福尼亚的情况如何?
Picking up where we left off, with the ‘tale of the Wogies’, a logical place to start is precisely the boundary zone between these two culture areas. As it turns out, the Yurok and other ‘Protestant foragers’ of northern California were, even by Californian standards, unusual, and it behoves us to understand why.
从我们离开的地方,即 “Wogies 的故事” 开始,一个合乎逻辑的地方正是这两个文化区域之间的边界地带。事实证明,加利福尼亚北部的尤洛克人和其他 “新教觅食者”,即使以加利福尼亚的标准来看,也是不寻常的,我们有责任了解原因。
Alfred Kroeber, who pioneered the ethnographic study of California’s indigenous population, described its northwest section as a ‘shatter zone’, an area of unusual diversity, bridging the two great culture areas of the Pacific littoral. Here the distribution of ethnic and language groups – Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Tolowa, and as many as a dozen even smaller societies – compressed like the bellows of an accordion. Some of these micro-nations spoke languages of the Athabascan family; others, in their domestic arrangements and architecture, retained traces of aristocracy that point clearly to their origins somewhere up on the Northwest Coast. Still, with very few exceptions, none practised chattel slavery.59
阿尔弗雷德·克罗伯是加州原住民民族学研究的先驱,他将加州的西北部描述为一个 “破碎区”,一个具有不寻常多样性的地区,连接着太平洋沿岸的两个大文化区。在这里,种族和语言群体的分布 —— 尤洛克(Yurok)、卡鲁克(Karuk)、胡帕(Hupa)、托洛瓦(Tolowa)以及多达十几个甚至更小的社会 —— 像手风琴的风箱一样被压缩。这些微型民族中,有的讲阿萨巴斯克语系的语言;有的则在其家庭安排和建筑中保留了贵族的痕迹,明确指出其起源于西北海岸的某个地方。不过,除了极少数例外,没有一个人实行动产奴役制。59
To underscore the contrast, we should note that in any true Northwest Coast settlement hereditary slaves might have constituted up to a quarter of the population. These figures are striking. As we noted earlier, they rival the demographic balance in the colonial South at the height of the cotton boom and are in line with estimates for household slavery in classical Athens.60 If so, these were full-blown ‘slave societies’ where unfree labour underpinned the domestic economy and sustained the prosperity of nobles and commoners alike. Assuming that many groups came south from the Northwest Coast, as linguistic and other evidence suggests, and that at least some of this movement took place after about 1800 BC (when slavery was most likely institutionalized), the question becomes: when and how did foragers in the ‘shatter zone’ come to lose the habit of keeping slaves?
为了强调这种对比,我们应该注意到,在任何真正的西北海岸定居点,世袭奴隶可能占到人口的四分之一。这些数字是惊人的。正如我们前面所指出的,它们可以与南方殖民地在棉花繁荣时期的人口平衡相媲美,并且与古典雅典的家庭奴隶制的估计相一致。60如果是这样,这些都是完全的 “奴隶社会”,不自由的劳动力支撑着国内经济,维持着贵族和平民的繁荣。假设许多群体从西北海岸南下,正如语言学和其他证据所表明的那样,而且至少有一些迁移发生在大约公元前 1800 年之后(那时奴隶制最,可能已经制度化),那么问题就来了:“破碎区” 的觅食者何时以及如何失去饲养奴隶的习惯?
The ‘when’ part of this question is really a matter for future research. The ‘how’ part is more accessible. In many of these societies one can observe customs that seem explicitly designed to head off the danger of captive status becoming permanent. Consider, for example, the Yurok requirement for victors in battle to pay compensation for each life taken, at the same rate one would pay if one were guilty of murder. This seems a highly efficient way of making inter-group raiding both fiscally pointless and morally bankrupt. In monetary terms, military advantage became a liability to the winning side. As Kroeber put it, ‘The vae victis of civilization might well have been replaced among the Yurok, in a monetary sense at least, by the dictum: “Woe to the victors.”’61
这个问题的 “何时” 部分确实是未来研究的问题。而 “如何” 的部分则更容易理解。在许多这样的社会中,我们可以观察到一些习俗,这些习俗似乎是为了避免俘虏身份成为永久性的危险。例如,考虑到尤罗克人要求战斗中的胜利者为每条被夺走的生命支付赔偿金,赔偿金额与谋杀罪的赔偿金额相同。这似乎是一种非常有效的方式,使群体间的掠夺在财政上毫无意义,在道德上也破产了。在货币方面,军事优势成为胜利一方的负担。正如克罗伯所说,“至少在货币意义上,文明的胜利者在尤罗克人中很可能已经被 “胜利者有祸了” 的箴言所取代。61
The Chetcos’ cautionary tale of the Wogies offers some further pointers. It suggests that populations directly adjacent to the Californian ‘shatter zone’ were aware of their northern neighbours and saw them as warlike, and as disposed to a life of luxury based on exploiting the labour of those they subdued. It implies they recognized such exploitation as a possibility in their own societies yet rejected it, since keeping slaves would undermine important social values (they would become ‘fat and lazy’). Turning south, to the California shatter zone itself, we find evidence that, in many key areas of social life, the foragers of this region were indeed building their communities, in good schismogenetic fashion, as a kind of mirror image; a conscious inversion of those on the Northwest Coast. Some examples are in order.
切特科关于 Wogies 的警告性故事提供了一些进一步的指示。它表明,与加利福尼亚 “破碎区” 直接相邻的居民了解他们的北方邻居,并认为他们好战,而且倾向于过一种基于剥削他们所征服的人的劳动的奢侈生活。这意味着他们认识到这种剥削在他们自己的社会中是可能的,但却拒绝接受,因为保留奴隶会破坏重要的社会价值(他们会变得 ‘肥胖和懒惰’)。向南转到加利福尼亚破碎区本身,我们发现有证据表明,在社会生活的许多关键领域,这一地区的觅食者确实在以良好的分裂生成方式建立他们的社区,作为一种镜像;对西北海岸的社区进行有意识的颠覆。以下是一些例子。
Clues emerge from the simplest and most apparently pragmatic details. Let us cite just one or two. No free member of a Northwest Coast household would ever be seen chopping or carrying wood.62 To do so was to undermine one’s own status, effectively making oneself the equivalent of a slave. Californian chiefs, by contrast, seem to have elevated these exact same activities into a solemn public duty, incorporating them into the core rituals of the sweat lodge. As Goldschmidt observed:
线索出现在最简单和最明显的实用性细节中。让我们只举一两个例子。在西北海岸的家庭中,没有一个自由成员会被看到去砍伐或搬运木材。62这样做是在破坏自己的地位,实际上使自己相当于一个奴隶。相比之下,加利福尼亚酋长似乎将这些完全相同的活动提升为庄严的公共义务,并将其纳入汗蒸房的核心仪式中。正如戈德施密特所观察到的。
All men, particularly the youths, were exhorted to gather wood for use in sweating. This was not exploitation of child labor, but an important religious act, freighted with significance. Special wood was brought from the mountain ridges; it was used for an important purification ritual. The gathering itself was a religious act, for it was a means of acquiring ‘luck.’ It had to be done with the proper psychological attitude of which restrained demeanor and constant thinking about the acquisition of riches were the chief elements. The job became a moral end rather than a means to an end, with both religious and economic involvements.63
所有的人,特别是年轻人,都被劝说去收集木材用于发汗。这不是剥削童工,而是一种重要的宗教行为,具有重要意义。特殊的木材从山脊上运来;它被用于一个重要的净化仪式。采集本身就是一种宗教行为,因为它是获得 “运气” 的一种手段。它必须以适当的心理态度进行,其中克制的举止和对获得财富的不断思考是主要因素。这项工作成为一种道德目的,而不是达到目的的手段,同时涉及宗教和经济问题。63
Similarly, the ritual sweating that ensued – by purging the Californian male’s body of surplus fluid – inverts the excessive consumption of fat, blubber and grease that signified masculine status on the Northwest Coast. To enhance his status and impress his ancestors, the nobleman of the Northwest Coast ladled candlefish oil into the fire at the tournament fields of the potlatch; the Californian chief, by contrast, burned calories in the closed seclusion of his sweat lodge.
同样,随之而来的仪式性出汗 —— 通过清除加利福尼亚男性体内多余的液体 —— 颠倒了在西北海岸象征男性地位的脂肪、鲸脂和油脂的过度消耗。为了提高自己的地位,给祖先留下好印象,西北海岸的贵族在锅庄的比赛场上把烛鱼油舀进火里;相比之下,加利福尼亚的酋长在他的汗屋里封闭的隐蔽处燃烧卡路里。
Native Californians seem to have been well aware of the kinds of values they were rejecting. They even institutionalized them in the figure of the clown,64 whose public antics of sloth, gluttony and megalomania – while offering a platform from which to sound off about local problems and discontents – also seem to parody the most coveted values of a proximate civilization. Further inversions occur in the domains of spiritual and aesthetic life. Artistic traditions of the Northwest Coast are all about spectacle and deception: the theatrical trickery of masks that flicker open and shut, of surface figures pulling the gaze in sharply opposed directions. The native word for ‘ritual’ in most Northwest Coast languages actually translates as ‘fraud’ or ‘illusion’.65 Californian spirituality provides an almost perfect antithesis. What mattered was cultivation of the inner self through discipline, earnest training, and hard work. Californian art entirely avoids the use of masks.
加州土著人似乎很清楚他们所拒绝的是哪种价值观。他们甚至通过小丑的形象将其制度化。64他的懒惰、贪食和自大的公共滑稽行为 —— 虽然提供了一个平台,让人们对当地的问题和不满发出声音 —— 也似乎在模仿一个近代文明最令人羡慕的价值。进一步的反转发生在精神和审美生活的领域。西北海岸的艺术传统都是关于奇观和欺骗的:面具的戏剧性诡计,忽开忽关,表面人物将目光拉向截然相反的方向。在大多数西北海岸的语言中,“仪式” 的土语实际上被翻译为 “欺诈” 或 “幻觉”。65加利福尼亚的精神信仰提供了一个几乎完美的对立面。重要的是通过纪律、认真的训练和努力工作来培养内在的自我。加州艺术完全避免了使用面具。
Moreover, Californian songs and poetry show that disciplined training and work were ways of connecting with what is authentic in life. So, while Northwest Coast groups were not averse to adopting Europeans in lavish naming ceremonies, would-be Californians – like Robert Frank, adopted by the Yurok in the late nineteenth century – were more likely to find themselves hauling wood from the mountains, weeping with each footfall, as they earned their place among the ‘real people’.66
此外,加利福尼亚的歌曲和诗歌表明,有纪律的训练和工作是与生活中的真实事物相联系的方式。因此,虽然西北海岸的群体并不排斥在奢华的命名仪式中收养欧洲人,但未来的加利福尼亚人 —— 如 19 世纪末被尤罗克人收养的罗伯特·弗兰克 —— 更有可能发现自己从山上拖运木材,每一次落脚都在哭泣,因为他们在 “真正的人” 中赢得了地位。66
If we accept that what we call ‘society’ refers to the mutual creation of human beings, and that ‘value’ refers to the most conscious aspects of that process, then it really is hard to see the Northwest Coast and California as anything but opposites. People in both regions engaged in extravagant expenditures of labour, but the forms and functions of that labour could not have differed more. In the Northwest Coast, the exuberant multiplication of furniture, crests, poles, masks, mantles and boxes was consistent with the extravagance and theatricality of potlatch. The ultimate purpose of all this work and ritual creativity, however, was to ‘fasten on’ names and titles to aristocratic contenders – to fashion specific sorts of persons. The result, among other things, is that Northwest Coast artistic traditions are still widely considered among the most dazzling the world has ever seen; immediately recognizable for their strong focus on the theme of exteriority – a world of masks, illusions and façades.67
如果我们接受我们所称的 “社会” 是指人类的相互创造,而 “价值” 是指这一过程中最有意识的方面,那么,我们确实很难把西北海岸和加利福尼亚看作是相反的东西。这两个地区的人们都从事着奢侈的劳动支出,但这种劳动的形式和功能却没有什么不同。在西北海岸,家具、徽章、柱子、面具、斗篷和盒子的大量增加与锅庄的奢侈和戏剧性是一致的。然而,所有这些工作和仪式创意的最终目的是为贵族竞争者 “贴上” 名字和头衔 —— 塑造特定类型的人。其结果是,除其他外,西北海岸的艺术传统仍然被广泛认为是世界上有史以来最令人眼花缭乱的艺术之一;它们因强烈关注外表的主题而被立即识别出来 —— 一个由面具、幻觉和门面组成的世界。67
Societies in the Californian shatter zone were equally extravagant in their own way. But if they were ‘potlatch ing’ anything, then surely it was labour itself. As one ethnographer wrote of another Yurok neighbour, the Atsugewi: ‘The ideal individual was both wealthy and industrious. In the first grey haze of dawn he arose to begin his day’s work, never ceasing activity until late at night. Early rising and the ability to go without sleep were great virtues. It was extremely complimentary to say “he doesn’t know how to sleep.”’68 Wealthy men – and it should be noted that all these societies were decidedly patriarchal – were typically seen as providers for poorer dependants, improvident folk and foolish drifters, by virtue of their own self-discipline and labour and that of their wives.
加利福尼亚州破碎区的社会以自己的方式同样奢侈。但是,如果他们是在 “偷窃” 什么,那么肯定是劳动本身。正如一位民族学家在谈到另一个尤罗克人的邻居阿苏格维人时写道:“理想的个人是既富有又勤劳的。在黎明的第一道灰霾中,他起身开始一天的工作,直到深夜都没有停止活动。早起和不睡觉的能力是伟大的美德。说 “他不知道如何睡觉” 是极为恭维的。68富有的男人 —— 应该指出的是,所有这些社会都是明显的父权制 —— 通常被视为贫穷的受抚养人、不自量力的人和愚蠢的漂泊者的供养者,凭借的是他们自己的自律和劳动以及他们妻子的努力。
With its ‘Protestant’ emphasis on interiority and introspection, Californian spirituality offers a perfect counterpoint to the smoke and mirrors of Northwest Coast ceremonials. Among the Yurok, work properly performed became a way of connecting with a true reality, of which prized objects like dentalia and hummingbird scalps were mere outward manifestations. A contemporary ethnographer explains:
由于其 “新教” 强调内在性和内省,加利福尼亚的精神信仰为西北海岸仪式的烟雾和镜面提供了一个完美的对立面。在尤罗克人中,适当的工作成为与真正的现实相联系的一种方式,而像牙签和蜂鸟头皮这样的珍贵物品只是其外在表现形式。一位当代民族志学者解释说。
As he ‘accumulates’ himself and becomes cleaner, the person in training sees himself as more and more ‘real’ and thus the world as more and more ‘beautiful’: a real place in experience rather than merely a setting for a ‘story,’ for intellectual knowledge … In 1865, Captain Spott, for instance, trained for many weeks as he helped the medicine man prepare for the First Salmon ceremony at the mouth of the Klamath River … ‘the old [medicine] man sent him to bring down sweathouse wood. On the way he cried with nearly every step because now he was seeing with his own eyes how it was done.’ … Tears, crying, are of crucial importance in Yurok spiritual training as manifestations of personal yearning, sincerity, humility, and openness.69
随着他 “积累” 自己并变得更干净,接受训练的人认为自己越来越 “真实”,因此世界也越来越 “美丽”:在经验中是一个真实的地方,而不仅仅是一个 “故事” 和知识的背景 …… 例如,1865 年,斯波特船长在帮助药师准备在克拉玛斯河口举行的第一条鲑鱼仪式时,进行了许多周的训练…… “老药师让他去把汗屋的木头拿下来。在路上,他几乎每走一步就哭一次,因为现在他亲眼看到这一切是如何完成的…… 泪水、哭泣在尤罗克人的精神训练中至关重要,是个人渴望、真诚、谦逊和开放的表现。69
Through such exertions one discovered one’s true vocation and purpose; and when ‘someone else’s purpose in life is to interfere with you,’ the same ethnographer was told, ‘he must be stopped, lest you become his slave, his “pet”.’
通过这样的努力,人们发现了自己真正的天职和目的;而当 “别人的生活目的是干扰你”,同一位民族学者被告知,“必须阻止他,以免你成为他的奴隶,他的 ‘宠物’。”
The Yurok, with their puritanical manners and extraordinary cultural emphasis on work and money, might seem an odd choice to celebrate as anti-slavery heroes (though many Calvinist Abolitionists were not so very different). But of course we’re not introducing them as heroes, any more than we wish to represent their Northwest Coast neighbours as the villains of the piece. We are introducing them as a way to illustrate how the process by which cultures define themselves against one another is always, at root, political, since it involves self-conscious arguments about the proper way to live. Revealingly, the arguments appear to have been most intense precisely in this border zone between anthropological ‘culture areas’.
尤罗克人,以其清教徒的礼仪和对工作和金钱的非凡文化强调,作为反奴隶制的英雄来庆祝似乎是一个奇怪的选择(尽管许多加尔文教派的废奴主义者并不那么与众不同)。但是,我们当然不是把他们作为英雄来介绍,就像我们希望把他们的西北海岸邻居作为作品中的恶棍一样。我们介绍他们是为了说明各种文化相互定义的过程从根本上说总是政治性的,因为它涉及到关于正确生活方式的自我意识的争论。令人惊讶的是,这些争论似乎正是在人类学 “文化区” 之间的边界地带最为激烈。
As we mentioned, the Yurok and their immediate neighbours were somewhat unusual, even by Californian standards. Yet they are unusual in contradictory ways. On the one hand, they actually did hold slaves, if few in number. Almost all the peoples of central and southern California, the Maidu, Wintu, Pomo and so on, rejected the institution entirely.70 There appear to have been at least two reasons for this. First, almost everywhere except in the northwest, a man or woman’s money and other wealth was ritually burned at death – and as a result, the institution served as an effective levelling mechanism.71 The Yurok-Karuk-Hupa area was one of the few places where dentalium could actually be inherited. Combine this with the fact that quarrels did lead to war much more frequently here than anywhere else, and you have a kind of shrunken, diminished version of the Northwest Coast ranking system, in this case a tripartite division between wealthy families, ordinary Yurok and paupers.72
正如我们所提到的,尤罗克人和他们的近邻有些不寻常,即使以加利福尼亚的标准来看也是如此。然而,他们的不寻常之处是相互矛盾的。一方面,他们实际上确实持有奴隶,尽管数量很少。几乎所有加州中部和南部的民族,如梅杜族、温图族、波莫族等,都完全拒绝这种制度。70这似乎至少有两个原因。首先,除西北部外,几乎所有地方的男人或女人的金钱和其他财富在死亡时都会被仪式性地烧掉 —— 因此,该制度成为一种有效的平准机制。71尤罗克·卡鲁克·胡帕地区是为数不多的可以真正继承牙膏的地方之一。结合这一事实,争吵导致的战争在这里比其他任何地方都要频繁,你就有了一种缩小的、减弱的西北海岸等级制度,在这种情况下,富裕家庭、普通尤鲁克人和贫民之间有一个三方的分割。72
Captives were not slaves, all sources insist they were redeemed quickly, and all killers had to pay compensation; but all this required money. This meant the important men who often instigated wars could profit handsomely from the affair by lending to those unable to pay, and the latter were thus either reduced to debt peons, or retreated to live ignominiously in isolated homesteads in the woods.73 One might see the intense focus on obtaining money, and resultant puritanism, and also the strong moral opposition to slave-raiding as a result of tensions created by living in this unstable and chaotic buffer zone between the two regions. Elsewhere in California, formal chiefs or headmen existed, and though they wielded no power of compulsion they settled conflicts by raising funds for compensation collectively, and the focus of cultural life was less on the accumulation of property than on organizing annual rites of world renewal.
俘虏不是奴隶,所有的资料都坚持认为他们很快就会被赎回,所有的杀人者都必须支付赔偿金;但这一切都需要钱。这意味着那些经常挑起战争的重要人物可以通过贷款给那些无力支付的人而从中获得丰厚的利润,而后者则因此而沦为负债累累的农民,或者退而求其次,在树林中孤立的家园里过着无耻的生活。73人们可能会看到对获得金钱的强烈关注,以及由此产生的清教主义,还有对掠夺奴隶的强烈道德反对,这都是生活在两个地区之间的这个不稳定和混乱的缓冲区所产生的紧张关系的结果。在加利福尼亚的其他地方,存在着正式的酋长或头人,虽然他们没有强制力,但他们通过集体筹集赔偿资金来解决冲突,而且文化生活的重点不在于财产的积累,而在于组织每年的世界复兴仪式。
Here one might say things have turned full circle. The ostensible purpose of the potlatch and spectacular competitions over wealth and heirloom titles on the Northwest Coast was, ultimately, to win prized roles in the great midwinter masquerades that were, similarly, intended to revive the forces of nature. California chiefs too were ultimately concerned with winter masquerades – being Californians, they did not employ literal masks, but, as in the Kwakiutl midwinter ceremonial, gods came down to earth and were embodied in costumed dancers – designed to regenerate the world and save it from imminent destruction. The difference, of course, was that in the absence of a servile labour force or any system of hereditary titles, Californian Pomo or Maidu chiefs had to go about organizing such rituals in an entirely different way.
在这里,人们可以说事情已经转了一圈。西北海岸的锅庄和关于财富和传家宝头衔的壮观竞赛的表面目的,最终是为了在伟大的隆冬化装舞会中赢得珍贵的角色,同样,隆冬化装舞会的目的是恢复自然的力量。加利福尼亚州的酋长们最终也关注冬季化装舞会 —— 作为加利福尼亚人,他们没有使用字面上的面具,但是,就像在 Kwakiutl 的隆冬仪式中一样,神灵下凡,体现在盛装的舞者身上 —— 旨在使世界再生,使其免遭即将到来的毁灭。当然,不同的是,在没有奴役性劳动力或任何世袭头衔制度的情况下,加利福尼亚波莫或梅杜酋长不得不以完全不同的方式来组织这种仪式。
Environmental determinists have an unfortunate tendency to treat humans as little more than automata, living out some economist’s fantasy of rational calculation. To be fair, they don’t deny that human beings are quirky and imaginative creatures – they just seem to reason that, in the long run, this fact makes very little difference. Those who don’t follow an optimal pathway for the use of resources are destined for the ash heap of history. Anthropologists who object to this kind of determinism will typically appeal to culture, but ultimately this comes down to little more than insisting that explanation is impossible: English people act the way they do because they are English, Yurok act the way they do because they’re Yurok; why they are English or Yurok is not really ours to say. Humans – from this other perspective, which is just as extreme in its own way – are at best an arbitrary constellation of cultural elements, perhaps assembled according to some prevailing spirit, code or ethos, and which society ends up with which ethos is treated as beyond explanation, little more than a random roll of the dice.
环境决定论者有一种不幸的倾向,他们把人类当作不过是自动装置,活在一些经济学家的理性计算的幻想中。公平地说,他们并不否认人类,是古怪和富有想象力的生物 —— 他们只是似乎认为,从长远来看,这一事实没有什么区别。那些不遵循资源利用的最佳途径的人注定要被历史的灰堆所淘汰。反对这种决定论的人类学家通常会呼吁文化,但最终这只不过是坚持认为解释是不可能的。英国人的行为方式是因为他们是英国人,尤罗克人的行为方式是因为他们是尤罗克人;他们为什么是英国人或尤罗克人,其实不是我们可以说的。人类 —— 从这个另一个角度来看,也是同样极端的 —— 充其量是一个任意的文化元素组合,也许是根据某种普遍的精神、准则或精神气质组合起来的,哪个社会最终拥有哪种精神气质被视为无法解释,只是随机掷骰子而已。
Putting matters in such stark terms does not mean there is no truth to either position. The intersection of environment and technology does make a difference, often a huge difference, and to some degree, cultural difference really is just an arbitrary roll of the dice: there’s no ‘explanation’ for why Chinese is a tonal language and Finnish an agglutinative one; that’s just the way things happened to turn out. Still, if one treats the arbitrariness of linguistic difference as the foundation of all social theory – which is basically what structuralism did, and post-structuralism continues to do – the result is just as mechanically deterministic as the most extreme form of environmental determination. ‘Language speaks us.’ We are doomed to endlessly enact patterns of behaviour not of our own creation; not of anyone’s creation really, until some seismic shift in the cultural equivalent of tectonic plates lands us somehow in a new, equally inexplicable arrangement.
把事情说得如此尖锐并不意味着两种立场都没有真理。环境和技术的交叉作用确实产生了差异,而且往往是巨大的差异,在某种程度上,文化差异确实只是一种任意的掷骰子行为:没有任何 “解释” 为什么汉语是一种声调语言,而芬兰语是一种凝集语言;这只是事情发生的方式。但是,如果我们把语言差异的任意性当作所有社会理论的基础 —— 这基本上是结构主义所做的,后结构主义也继续这样做 —— 其结果就像最极端的环境决定形式一样是机械的决定论。'语言说出了我们。我们注定要无休止地制定不是我们自己创造的行为模式;其实也不是任何人创造的,直到相当于构造板块的文化的一些地震性转变,使我们以某种方式进入一个新的、同样无法解释的安排。
In other words, both approaches presume that we are already, effectively, stuck. This is why we ourselves place so much emphasis on the notion of self-determination. Just as it is reasonable to assume that Pleistocene mammoth hunters, moving back and forth between different seasonal forms of organization, must have developed a degree of political self-consciousness – to have thought about the relative merits of different ways of living with one another – so too the intricate webs of cultural difference that came to characterize human societies after the end of the last Ice Age must surely have involved a degree of political introspection. Once again, our intention is simply to treat those who created these forms of culture as intelligent adults, capable of reflecting on the social worlds they were building or rejecting.
换句话说,这两种方法都假定我们已经,有效地,被困住了。这就是为什么我们自己如此强调自我决定的概念。正如我们有理由认为,更新世的猛犸象猎人在不同的季节性组织形式之间来回穿梭,一定会发展出一定程度的政治自我意识 —— 思考不同的生活方式对彼此的相对好处 —— 同样,在上个冰河时代结束后,错综复杂的文化差异网络成为人类社会的特征,这肯定涉及一定程度的政治反省。再一次,我们的目的只是把那些创造这些文化形式的人当作聪明的成年人,能够反思他们正在建立或拒绝的社会世界。
Obviously, this approach, like any other, can be taken to ridiculous extremes. Returning momentarily to Weber’s Protestant Ethic, it is popular in certain circles to claim that ‘nations make choices’, that some have chosen to be Protestant and others Catholic, and that this is the main reason so many people in the United States or Germany are rich, and so many in Brazil or Italy are poor. This makes about as much sense as arguing that since everyone is free to make their own decisions, the fact that some people end up as financial consultants and others as security guards is entirely their own doing (indeed, it’s usually the same sort of people who make both sorts of argument). Perhaps Marx put it best: we make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing.
很明显,这种方法和其他方法一样,可以走到荒谬的极端。回到韦伯的新教伦理,在某些圈子里很流行的说法是 “国家做出了选择”,有些人选择了新教,有些人选择了天主教,这就是美洲或德国有这么多人富有,而巴西或意大利有这么多人贫穷的主要原因。这就像认为既然每个人都可以自由地做出自己的决定,那么有些人最终成为财务顾问,有些人成为保安,这完全是他们自己造成的一样有意义(事实上,通常是同一类人提出这两种论点)。也许马克思说得最好:我们创造自己的历史,但不是在我们自己选择的条件下。
In fact, one reason social theorists will always be debating this issue is that we can’t really know how much difference ‘human agency’ – the preferred term, currently, for what used to be called ‘free will’ – really makes. Historical events by definition happen only once, and there’s no real way to know if they ‘might’ have turned out otherwise (might Spain have never conquered Mexico? Could the steam engine have been invented in Ptolemaic Egypt, leading to an ancient industrial revolution?), or what the point of asking is even supposed to be. It seems part of the human condition that while we cannot predict future events, as soon as those events do happen we find it hard to see them as anything but inevitable. There’s no way to know. So precisely where one wishes to set the dial between freedom and determinism is largely a matter of taste.
事实上,社会理论家总是在争论这个问题的一个原因是,我们无法真正知道 “人类机构” —— 目前被称为 “自由意志” 的首选术语 —— 到底有多大区别。根据定义,历史事件只发生过一次,而且没有真正的办法知道它们是否 “可能” 会出现其他结果(西班牙是否从未征服过墨西哥?蒸汽机会不会在托勒密时代的埃及被发明,从而导致古代的工业革命呢?这似乎是人类状况的一部分,虽然我们无法预测未来的事件,但一旦这些事件真的发生,我们就很难把它们看作是不可避免的事情。没有办法知道。因此,一个人希望在自由和决定论之间设定的确切位置主要是一个品味问题。
Since this book is mainly about freedom, it seems appropriate to set the dial a bit further to the left than usual, and to explore the possibility that human beings have more collective say over their own destiny than we ordinarily assume. Rather than defining the indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific Coast of North America as ‘incipient’ farmers or as examples of ‘emerging’ complexity – which is really just an updated way of saying they were all ‘rushing headlong for their chains’ – we have explored the possibility that they might have been proceeding with (more or less) open eyes, and found plenty of evidence to support it.
由于这本书主要是关于自由的,所以似乎应该把表盘设置得比平时更左一点,并探讨人类对自己的命运拥有比我们通常假设的更多集体发言权的可能性。我们没有将北美洲太平洋沿岸的原住民定义为 “初生” 的农民或 “新兴” 的复杂性的例子 —— 这实际上只是一种最新的说法,即他们都是 “一头冲向他们的 ” —— 我们探讨了他们可能是以(或多或少)开放的眼光行事的可能性,并找到了大量的证据来支持它。
Slavery, we’ve argued, became commonplace on the Northwest Coast largely because an ambitious aristocracy found itself unable to reduce its free subjects to a dependable workforce. The ensuing violence seems to have spread until those in what we’ve been calling the ‘shatter zone’ of northern California gradually found themselves obliged to create institutions capable of insulating them from it, or at least its worst extremes. A schismogenetic process ensued, whereby coastal peoples came to define themselves increasingly against each other. This was by no means just an argument about slavery; it appears to have affected everything from the configuration of households, law, ritual and art to conceptions of what it meant to be an admirable human being, and was most evident in contrasting attitudes to work, food and material wealth.74
我们认为,奴隶制在西北海岸变得普遍,主要是因为一个雄心勃勃的贵族发现自己无法将其自由臣民变成可靠的劳动力。随之而来的暴力似乎一直在蔓延,直到我们称之为 “破碎区” 的北加州的人们逐渐发现自己不得不建立能够使他们免受暴力影响的机构,或者至少是其最极端的情况。随之而来的是一个分裂的过程,沿海地区的人们越来越多地将自己定义为彼此的对手。这绝不仅仅是关于奴隶制的争论;它似乎影响了从家庭配置、法律、仪式和艺术到对成为一个令人钦佩的人的概念的一切,并且在对工作、食物和物质财富的态度对比中最为明显。74
All this played a crucial role in shaping what outsiders came to see as the predominant sensibility of each resulting ‘culture area’ – the flamboyant extravagance of one, the austere simplicity of the other. But it also resulted in the overwhelming rejection of the practice of slavery, and the class system it entailed, throughout every part of California except for its northwesternmost corner; and even there it remained sharply limited.
所有这一切在塑造外人眼中的每个 “文化区” 的主要感觉方面发挥了关键作用 —— 一个是浮华的奢侈,另一个是朴素的简单。但是,这也导致了在加州的每一个地方,除了最西北的一角之外,绝大多数人都拒绝奴隶制的做法,以及它所带来的阶级制度;即使在那里,奴隶制仍然受到严格的限制。
What does this tell us about the emergence of similar forms of domination in earlier phases of human history? Nothing for certain, of course. It is difficult to know for sure whether Mesolithic societies of the Baltic or Breton coast that remind us, superficially, of indigenous societies on the Northwest Coast of Canada were, in fact, organized on similar principles. ‘Complexity’ – as reflected in the co-ordination of labour or elaborate ritual systems – need not mean domination. But it seems likely that similar arrangements were, indeed, emerging in some parts of the world, in some times and places, and that when they did they did not go uncontested. Regional processes of cultural differentiation, of the kind one begins to see more evidence for after the end of the last Ice Age, were probably every bit as political as those of later ages, including the ones we have considered in this chapter.
这告诉我们,在人类历史的早期阶段,类似形式的统治出现了什么?当然,没有什么是确定的。我们很难确定波罗的海或布列塔尼海岸的中石器时代社会是否在表面上让我们想起了加拿大西北海岸的土著社会,事实上,这些社会是按照类似的原则组织的。“复杂性” —— 反映在劳动的协调或复杂的仪式系统中 —— 不一定意味着统治。但是,在世界的某些地方,在某些时间和地点,似乎确实出现了类似的安排,而且,当它们出现时,并不是没有争议的。在上个冰河时代结束后,人们开始看到更多的证据,这种文化分化的区域过程可能与后来的时代一样具有政治性,包括我们在本章中考虑的那些时代。
Second, we can now see more clearly that domination begins at home. The fact that these arrangements became subjects of political contestation does not mean they were political in origin. Slavery finds its origins in war. But everywhere we encounter it slavery is also, at first, a domestic institution. Hierarchy and property may derive from notions of the sacred, but the most brutal forms of exploitation have their origins in the most intimate of social relations: as perversions of nurture, love and caring. Certainly, those origins are not to be found in government. Northwest Coast societies lacked anything that could be remotely described as an overarching polity; the closest they came were the organizing committees of annual masquerades. Instead, one finds an endless succession of great wooden houses, tiny courts each centring on a title-holding family, the commoners attached to them, and their personal slaves. Even the rank system referred to divisions within the household. It seems very likely this was true in non-agricultural societies elsewhere as well.
第二,我们现在可以更清楚地看到,支配开始于家。这些安排成为政治争论的主题这一事实并不意味着它们是政治性的起源。奴隶制在战争中找到它的起源。但在我们遇到的任何地方,奴隶制起初也是一种家庭制度。等级制度和财产可能来自神圣的概念,但最残酷的剥削形式起源于最亲密的社会关系:作为养育、爱和关怀的变态。当然,这些起源在政府中是找不到的。西北海岸的社会缺乏任何可以远程描述为总体政体的东西;最接近的是年度化装舞会的组织委员会。相反,人们发现无休止的大木屋、小法庭,每个法庭都以一个拥有所有权的家族、附属于他们的平民和他们的私人奴隶为中心。即使是等级制度也是指家庭内部的划分。在其他地方的非农业社会中,似乎也很可能是这样。
Finally, all this suggests that, historically speaking, hierarchy and equality tend to emerge together, as complements to one another. Tlingit or Haida commoners on the Northwest Coast were effectively equals in that they were all equally excluded from the ranks of title holders and therefore, in comparison to the aristocrats – with their unique identities – formed a kind of undifferentiated mass. Insofar as Californian societies rejected that entire arrangement, they could be described as self-consciously egalitarian, but in a quite different sense. Odd as it may seem, this comes through most clearly in their enthusiastic embrace of money, and again comparisons with their northern neighbours are instructive. For Northwest Coast societies, wealth, which was sacred in every sense of the term, consisted above all of heirloom treasures, whose value was based on the fact that each was unique and there was nothing in the world like it. Equality between title holders was simply inconceivable, much though they might have argued about who ultimately outranked whom. In California, the most important forms of wealth consisted of currencies whose value lay in the degree to which each string of dentalium or band of woodpecker scalps was exactly the same, and could therefore be counted – and, generally speaking, such wealth was not inherited but destroyed on the owner’s death.
最后,所有这些都表明,从历史上看,等级制度和平等往往是一起出现的,是相互补充的。西北海岸的 Tlingit 或 Haida 平民实际上是平等的,因为他们都被平等地排除在所有权人的行列之外,因此,与贵族相比 —— 他们有独特的身份 —— 形成了一种无差别的群体。只要加利福尼亚社会拒绝整个安排,他们就可以被描述为自觉的平等主义,但在一个完全不同的意义上。虽然看起来很奇怪,但这一点在他们对金钱的热情拥抱中体现得淋漓尽致,而且与北方邻居的比较也很有启发。对西北海岸社会来说,财富在任何意义上都是神圣的,它首先由传家宝组成,其价值是基于这样一个事实,即每个人都是独一无二的,世界上没有任何东西与之相似。产权持有人之间的平等是根本无法想象的,尽管他们可能会争论谁的地位最终高于谁。在加利福尼亚,最重要的财富形式包括货币,其价值在于每一串牙签或啄木鸟头皮都是完全相同的,因此可以被计算在内 —— 而且,一般来说,这种财富不是继承的,而是在主人死后被销毁。
As our story continues, we will encounter this dynamic repeatedly. We might refer to it, perhaps, as ‘inequality from below’. Domination first appears on the most intimate, domestic level. Self-consciously egalitarian politics emerge to prevent such relations from extending beyond those small worlds into the public sphere (which often comes to be imagined, in the process, as an exclusive sphere for adult men). These are the kind of dynamics that culminated in phenomena like ancient Athenian democracy. But their roots probably extend much further back in time, to well before the advent of farming and agricultural societies.
随着我们故事的继续,我们将反复遇到这种动态。,我们也许可以把它称为 “来自下面的不平等”。支配首先出现在最亲密的家庭层面。自觉的平等主义政治的出现,是为了防止这种关系超越这些小世界而延伸到公共领域(在这个过程中,公共领域往往被想象为成年男子的专属领域)。这些都是在古代雅典民主等现象中达到顶峰的动态因素。但它们的根源可能会延伸到更远的年代,远在农耕和农业社会的出现之前。
The revolution that never happened: how Neolithic peoples avoided agriculture
Let us turn, then, to the origins of farming.
那么,让我们来看看农耕的起源。
‘Tell me this,’ writes Plato:
“告诉我这个”,柏拉图写道:
Would a serious and intelligent farmer, with seeds he cared about and wished to grow to fruition, sow them in summer in the gardens of Adonis and rejoice as he watched them become beautiful in a matter of eight days; or if he did it at all, would he do this for fun and festivity? For things he really was serious about, would he not use his farmer’s craft, plant them in a suitable environment, and be content if everything he planted came to maturity in the eighth month?1
一个严肃而聪明的农夫,拿着他关心并希望成长为果实的种子,会不会在夏天把它们播种在阿多尼斯的花园里,看着它们在八天内变得美丽而感到高兴;或者,如果他这样做,他会不会是为了好玩和庆祝而这样做?对于他真正认真对待的事情,他难道不会用他农民的手艺,把它们种在一个合适的环境中,如果他种下的东西在第八个月就成熟了,他就满足了?1
The gardens of Adonis, to which Plato is referring here, were a sort of festive speed farming which produced no food. For the philosopher, they offered a convenient simile for all things precocious, alluring, but ultimately sterile. In the dog days of summer, when nothing can grow, the women of ancient Athens fashioned these little gardens in baskets and pots. Each held a mix of quick-sprouting grain and herbs. The makeshift seedbeds were carried up ladders on to the flat roofs of private houses and left to wilt in the sun: a botanical re-enactment of the premature death of Adonis, the fallen hunter, slain in his prime by a wild boar. Then, beyond the public gaze of men and civic authority, began the rooftop rites. Open to women from all classes of Athenian society, including prostitutes, these were rites of grieving but also wanton drunkenness, and no doubt other forms of ecstatic behaviour as well.
柏拉图在这里提到的阿多尼斯的花园,是一种不生产食物的节日性快速农业。对这位哲学家来说,它们为所有早熟、诱人但最终不育的事物提供了一个方便的比喻。在夏天的狗日里,当什么都不能生长的时候,古雅典的妇女们用篮子和盆子打造了这些小花园。每个花园里都有快速出芽的谷物和草药的混合物。这些临时的苗床被从梯子上抬到私人房屋的平顶上,让它们在阳光下枯萎:这是阿多尼斯过早死亡的植物学重演,他是一个堕落的猎人,在他年轻的时候被野猪杀死。然后,在男人和市政当局的公众视线之外,开始了屋顶仪式。这些仪式向雅典社会各阶层的妇女开放,包括妓女,这些仪式是悲伤的,但也是肆意醉酒的,无疑也是其他形式的狂喜行为。
Historians agree that the roots of this women’s cult lie in Mesopotamian fertility rites of Dumuzi/Tammuz, the shepherd-god and personification of plant life, mourned on his death each summer. Most likely the worship of Adonis, his ancient Greek incarnation, spread westwards to Greece from Phoenicia in the wake of Assyrian expansion, in the seventh century BC . Nowadays, some scholars see the whole thing as a riotous subversion of patriarchal values: an antithesis to the staid and proper state-sponsored Thesmophoria (the autumn festival of the Greek fertility goddess, Demeter), celebrated by the wives of Athenian citizens and dedicated to the serious farming on which the life of the city depended. Others read the story of Adonis the other way round, as a requiem for the primeval drama of serious hunting, cast into shadow by the advent of agriculture, but not forgotten – an echo of lost masculinity.2
历史学家们一致认为,这种妇女崇拜的根源在于美索不达米亚的杜穆兹(Dumuzi/Tammuz)生育仪式,杜穆兹是牧神和植物生命的化身,每年夏天对他的死亡表示哀悼。最有可能的是对阿多尼斯的崇拜,他在古希腊的化身,在公元前七世纪亚述扩张之后从腓尼基向西传播到希腊。如今,一些学者认为整个事件是对父权制价值观的狂热颠覆:与国家支持的呆板和适当的 Thesmophoria(希腊生育女神德墨忒尔的秋季节日)相对立,后者由雅典公民的妻子们庆祝,并致力于城市生活所依赖的认真耕作。还有人从另一个角度来解读阿多尼斯的故事,认为它是对严肃狩猎的原始戏剧的安魂曲,由于农业的出现而陷入阴影,但并没有被遗忘 —— 这是失去的男性气质的回声。2
All well and good, you may say, but what does any of this have to do with the origins of farming? What have the gardens of Adonis got to do with the first Neolithic stirrings of agriculture some 8,000 years before Plato? Well, in a sense, everything. Because these scholarly debates encapsulate just the sort of problems that surround any modern investigation of this crucial topic. Was farming from the very beginning about the serious business of producing more food to supply growing populations? Most scholars assume, as a matter of course, that this had to be the principal reason for its invention. But maybe farming began as a more playful or even subversive kind of process – or perhaps even as a side effect of other concerns, such as the desire to spend longer in particular kinds of locations, where hunting and trading were the real priorities. Which of these two ideas really embodies the spirit of the first agriculturalists; is it the stately and pragmatic Thesmophoria, or the playful and self-indulgent gardens of Adonis?
你可能会说,这一切都很好,但这与农业的起源有什么关系?阿多尼斯的花园与柏拉图之前约 8000 年的新石器时代的第一次农业骚动有什么关系?嗯,从某种意义上说,一切都有关系。因为这些学术争论恰恰概括了围绕这一关键话题的任何现代调查的问题。耕作从一开始就是为了生产更多的食物来供应不断增长的人口而进行的严肃工作吗?大多数学者理所当然地认为,这必须是其发明的主要原因。但是,也许耕作开始时是一种更有趣的,甚至是颠覆性的过程 —— 或者甚至可能是其他问题的副作用,比如在特定类型的地方呆得更久的愿望,在那里狩猎和贸易是真正的优先事项。这两种想法中哪一种真正体现了第一批农业主义者的精神;是庄重而务实的 Thesmophoria,还是俏皮而自我放纵的阿多尼斯的花园?
No doubt the peoples of the Neolithic – the world’s first farmers – themselves spent a good deal of time debating similar questions. To get a sense of why we say this, let’s consider what is probably the most famous Neolithic site in the world, Çatalhöyük.
毫无疑问,新石器时代的人们 —— 世界上最早的农民 —— 自己也花了大量的时间来辩论类似的问题。为了了解我们为什么这样说,让我们考虑一下可能是世界上最著名的新石器时代遗址,恰塔霍裕克。
Located on the Konya Plain of central Turkey, Çatalhöyük was first settled around 7400 BC, and continued to be populated for some 1,500 years (for the purposes of mental calibration, roughly the same period of time that separates us from Amalafrida, Queen of the Vandals, who reached the height of her influence around AD 523). The site’s renown derives partly from its surprising scale. At thirteen hectares, it was more town than village, with a population of some 5,000. Yet it was a town with no apparent centre or communal facilities, or even streets: just a dense agglomeration of one household after another, all of similar sizes and layout, each accessed by ladder from the roof.
恰塔霍裕克位于土耳其中部的科尼亚平原,大约在公元前 7400 年首次有人定居,并持续居住了约 1500 年(为便于心理校准,与我们与汪达尔人的女王阿马拉弗里达相隔的时间大致相同,后者在公元 523 年左右达到了其影响力的顶点)。该遗址的名声部分来自于其惊人的规模。它占地 13 公顷,与其说是村庄,不如说是城镇,人口约 5000 人。然而,这是一个没有明显的中心或公共设施,甚至没有街道的城镇:只是一个又一个密集的住户聚集在一起,所有的大小和布局都差不多,每个人都可以从屋顶上用梯子进入。
If the overall plan of Çatalhöyük suggests an ethos of dreary uniformity, a maze of identical mud walls, the internal life of its buildings points in exactly the opposite direction. In fact, another reason for the site’s fame is its inhabitants’ distinctly macabre sense of interior design. If you’ve ever glimpsed the inside of a Çatalhöyük house you will never forget it: central living rooms, no more than sixteen feet across, with the skulls and horns of cattle and other creatures projecting inwards from the walls, and sometimes outwards from the fittings and furnishings. Many rooms also had vivid wall paintings and figurative mouldings, and contained platforms under which resided some portion of the household dead – remains of between six and sixty individuals in any given house – propping up the living. We can’t help recalling Maurice Sendak’s vision of a magical house where ‘the walls became the world all around’.3
如果说恰塔霍裕克的整体规划显示出一种沉闷的统一性,一个由相同的泥墙组成的迷宫,那么其建筑的内部生活则完全指向相反的方向。事实上,该遗址成名的另一个原因是其居民对内部设计的明显的恐怖感。如果你曾经瞥见过恰塔霍裕克房屋的内部,你将永远不会忘记:中央起居室,宽度不超过 16 英尺,牛和其他生物的头骨和角从墙上向内突出,有时从配件和家具向外突出。许多房间还有生动的壁画和形象化的模子,并有平台,平台下住着部分家庭死者 —— 任何一所房子里都有六到六十人的遗体 —— 支撑着生活。我们不禁想起莫里斯·森达克(Maurice Sendak)关于 “墙壁成为周围世界” 的神奇房子的设想。3
Generations of archaeologists have wanted to see Çatalhöyük as a monument to the ‘origins of farming’. Certainly, it’s easy to understand why this should be. It is among the first large settlements we know of whose inhabitants practised agriculture, and who got most of their nutrition from domesticated cereals, pulses, sheep and goats. It seems reasonable to see them, then, as the very engineers of what has been referred to since the time of V. Gordon Childe – prehistorian and author of Man Makes Himself (1936) and What Happened in History (1942) – as the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and when first excavated in the 1960s Çatalhöyük’s remarkable material culture was interpreted in this way. Clay figurines of seated women, including a famous example flanked by felines, were understood as depictions of a Mother Goddess, presiding over the fertility of women and crops. The wall-mounted ox-skulls (‘bucrania ’ ) were assumed to be those of domestic cattle, dedicated to a taurine deity responsible for the protection and reproduction of herds. Certain buildings were identified as ‘shrines’. All this ritual life was assumed to refer to serious farming – a Neolithic pageant play, more in the spirit of Demeter than Adonis.4
一代又一代的考古学家都希望把恰塔霍裕克作为 “农业起源” 的纪念碑。当然,我们很容易理解为什么会这样。它是我们所知的最早的大型定居点之一,其居民从事农业生产,并从驯化的谷物、豆类、绵羊和山羊中获取大部分营养。那么,似乎有理由把他们看作是自 V·Gordon Childe(史前学家,《人类创造自己》(1936 年)和《历史上发生了什么》(1942 年)的作者)时代以来被称为 “农业革命” 的工程师,而在 20 世纪 60 年代首次发掘恰塔霍裕克的非凡物质文化时,就是这样解释的。泥塑的妇女坐像,包括一个著名的由猫科动物陪伴的坐像,被理解为对母神的描绘,主持妇女和庄稼的生育。挂在墙上的牛头骨(‘bucrania’)被认为是家畜的头骨,献给负责保护和繁殖牛群的牛神。某些建筑被认定为 “神殿”。所有这些仪式性的生活被认为是指严肃的耕作 —— 新石器时代的选美剧,更多的是以德墨忒尔的精神而不是阿多尼斯的精神。4
But more recent excavations suggest we have been too quick to write off Adonis.5 Since the 1990s, new methods of fieldwork at Çatalhöyük produced a string of surprises, which oblige us to revise both the history of the world’s oldest town and also how we think about the origins of farming in general. The cattle, it turns out, were not domestic: those impressive skulls belonged to fierce, wild aurochs. The shrines were not shrines, but houses in which people engaged in such everyday tasks as cooking, eating and crafts – just like anywhere else, except they happened to contain a larger density of ritual paraphernalia. Even the Mother Goddess has been cast into shadow. It is not so much that corpulent female figurines stopped turning up entirely in the excavations, but that the new finds tended to appear, not in shrines or on thrones, but in trash dumps outside houses with the heads broken off and didn’t really seem to have been treated as objects of religious veneration.6
但最近的发掘表明,我们太急于撇开阿多尼斯了。5自 20 世纪 90 年代以来,恰塔霍裕克的新田野工作方法产生了一连串的惊喜,使我们不得不重新审视这个世界上最古老城镇的历史,以及我们对一般农业起源的看法。事实证明,这些牛并不是家畜:那些令人印象深刻的头骨属于凶猛的野牛。祠堂不是祠堂,而是人们从事烹饪、饮食和手工艺等日常工作的房屋 —— 就像其他地方一样,只不过它们碰巧包含了更多的祭祀用品。即使是母神也被投进了阴影。这并不是说在挖掘过程中不再出现丰满的女性雕像,而是说新发现的雕像往往不是出现在神龛或宝座上,而是出现在房屋外的垃圾堆中,头部被打掉,似乎并没有真正被当作宗教崇拜的对象。6
Today, most archaeologists consider it deeply unsound to interpret prehistoric images of corpulent women as ‘fertility goddesses’. The very idea that they should be is the result of long-outmoded Victorian fantasies about ‘primitive matriarchy’. In the nineteenth century, it’s true, matriarchy was considered the default mode of political organization for Neolithic societies (as opposed to the oppressive patriarchy of the ensuing Bronze Age). As a result, almost every image of a fertile-looking woman was interpreted as a goddess. Nowadays, archaeologists are more likely to point out that many figurines could just as easily have been the local equivalents of Barbie dolls (the kind of Barbie dolls one might have in a society with very different standards of female beauty); or that different figurines might have served entirely different purposes (no doubt correct); or to dismiss the entire debate by insisting we simply have no idea why people created so many female images and never will, so any interpretations on offer are more likely to be projections of our own assumptions about women, gender or fertility than anything that would have made sense to an inhabitant of Neolithic Anatolia.
今天,大多数考古学家认为,将史前肥胖妇女的形象解释为 “生育女神” 是非常不可靠的。认为她们应该是这样的想法是维多利亚时代对 “原始母权制” 长期过时的幻想的结果。在 19 世纪,的确,母权制被认为是新石器时代社会的默认政治组织模式(相对于随后的青铜时代的压迫性父权制而言)。因此,几乎所有长相肥硕的女性形象都被解释为女神。如今,考古学家们更倾向于指出,许多小雕像可能很容易成为当地的芭比娃娃(在一个对女性之美的标准非常不同的社会中可能有的那种芭比娃娃);或者不同的小雕像可能有完全不同的目的(无疑是正确的)。或者坚持认为我们根本不知道为什么人们创造了这么多的女性形象,也永远不会知道,所以任何解释都更有可能是我们自己对女性、性别或生育能力的假设的投射,而不是对新石器时代安纳托利亚的居民有意义的东西。
All of which might seem a bit pedantic, but in this hair-splitting, as we’ll see, there’s a great deal at stake.
所有这些可能看起来有点迂腐,但正如我们将看到的那样,在这种争论中,有一个很大的问题。
It’s not just the idea of ‘primitive matriarchy’ that’s become such a bugaboo today: even to suggest that women had unusually prominent positions in early farming communities is to invite academic censure. Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising. In the same way that social rebels, since the 1960s, tended to idealize hunter-gatherer bands, earlier generations of poets, anarchists and bohemians had tended to idealize the Neolithic as an imaginary, beneficent theocracy ruled over by priestesses of the Great Goddess, the all-powerful distant ancestor of Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte and Demeter herself – that is, until such societies were overwhelmed by violent, patriarchal Indo-European-speaking horse-men descending from the steppes, or, in the case of the Middle East, Semitic-speaking nomads from the deserts. How people saw this imagined confrontation became the source of a major political divide in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
今天,不仅仅是 “原始母权制” 的想法成为了一个禁忌:甚至暗示妇女在早期农业社区拥有异常突出的地位也会招致学术界的指责。也许这并不完全令人惊讶。自 20 世纪 60 年代以来,社会反叛者倾向于将狩猎采集者群体理想化,同样,前几代的诗人、无政府主义者和波希米亚人也倾向于将新石器时代理想化,认为它是由大女神的女祭司统治的想象中的、有益的神权。也就是说,直到这种社会被来自大草原的暴力的、讲父权制的印欧语的马人所淹没,或者在中东,来自沙漠的讲闪米特语的游牧民族所淹没。人们如何看待这种想象中的对抗,成为 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初主要政治分歧的根源。
To give you a flavour of this, let’s look at Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–98), considered in her lifetime one of the most prominent American feminists. Gage was also an anti-Christian, attracted to the Haudenosaunee ‘matriarchate’, which she believed to be one of the few surviving examples of Neolithic social organization, and a staunch defender of indigenous rights, so much so that she was eventually adopted as a Mohawk clan mother. (She spent the last years of her life in the home of her devoted son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books – a series of a dozen volumes in which, as many have pointed out, there are queens, good witches and princesses, but not a single legitimate male figure of authority.) In Woman, Church, and State (1893), Gage posited the universal existence of an early form of society ‘known as the Matriarchate or Mother-rule’, where institutions of government and religion were modelled on the relationship of mother to child in the household.
为了让你了解这一点,让我们看看马蒂尔达·乔斯林·盖奇(1826-98),在她生前被认为是最杰出的美洲女权主义者之一。盖奇也是一个反基督教者,被豪德诺苏尼族的 “母系社会” 所吸引,她认为那是新石器时代社会组织的少数幸存例子之一,她是原住民权利的坚定捍卫者,以至于她最终被收养为莫霍克族的母亲。 (她在她忠实的女婿 L·Frank Baum 的家里度过了她生命中的最后几年,L·Frank Baum 是《奥兹国》系列书籍的作者 —— 正如许多人指出的那样,这一系列书籍中有女王、好女巫和公主,但没有一个合法的男性权威人物。)在《妇女、教会和国家》(1893 年)中,盖奇提出了一种普遍存在的早期社会形式,“被称为母权制或母亲统治”,其中政府和宗教机构是以家庭中母亲与孩子的关系为模式。
Or consider one of Sigmund Freud’s two favourite students: Otto Gross, an anarchist who in the years before the First World War developed a theory that the superego was in fact patriarchy and needed to be destroyed so as to unleash the benevolent, matriarchal collective unconscious, which he saw as the hidden but still-living residue of the Neolithic. (This he set out to accomplish largely through the use of drugs and polyamorous sexual relationships; Gross’s work is now largely remembered for its influence on Freud’s other favourite student, Carl Jung, who kept the idea of the collective unconscious but rejected Gross’s political conclusions.) After the Great War, Nazis began to take up the same story of the ‘Aryan’ invasions from the exact opposite perspective, representing the imagined, patriarchal invaders as the ancestors of their master race.
或者考虑一下西格蒙德·弗洛伊德最喜欢的两个学生之一。奥托·格罗斯(Otto Gross)是一位无政府主义者,他在第一次世界大战前的几年里提出了一个理论,认为超我实际上是父权制,需要被摧毁,以便释放出仁慈的、母权制的集体无意识,他认为这是新石器时代隐藏的但仍然活着的残留物。(他主要通过使用药物和多角性关系来实现这一目标;格罗斯的工作现在主要是因为其对弗洛伊德的另一个最受欢迎的学生卡尔·荣格的影响而被人记住,荣格保留了集体无意识的概念,但拒绝了格罗斯的政治结论。)大战结束后,纳粹开始从完全相反的角度接手同样的 “雅利安人” 入侵的故事,将想象中的、父权制的入侵者表现为他们主人种族的祖先。
With such intense politicization of what were obviously fanciful readings of prehistory, it’s hardly surprising that the topic of ‘primitive matriarchy’ became something of an embarrassment – the intellectual equivalent of a no-go zone – for subsequent generations. But it’s hard to avoid the impression something else is going on here. The degree of erasure has been extraordinary, and far more than is warranted by mere suspicion of an overstated or outdated theory. Among academics today, belief in primitive matriarchy is treated as a kind of intellectual offence, almost on a par with ‘scientific racism’, and its exponents have been written out of history: Gage from the history of feminism, Gross from that of psychology (despite inventing such concepts as introversion and extroversion, and having worked closely with everyone from Franz Kafka and the Berlin Dadaists to Max Weber).
在对史前史进行如此强烈的政治化解读的情况下,“原始母系制” 的话题成为后世的尴尬 —— 相当于知识界的禁区 —— 也就不足为奇了。但很难避免的是,这里还发生了别的事情。抹杀的程度非同寻常,远远超过了对一个夸张或过时的理论的单纯怀疑所需要的程度。在今天的学术界,对原始母权制的信仰被视为一种智力上的犯罪,几乎与 “科学种族主义” 相提并论,其倡导者已被从历史中删除。盖奇退出了女权主义的历史,格罗斯退出了心理学的历史(尽管他发明了内向性和外向性等概念,并与从弗朗茨·卡夫卡和柏林达达主义者到马克斯·韦伯等人密切合作)。
This is odd. After all, a century or so does seem more than enough time for the dust to settle. Why is the matter still so shrouded in taboo?
这很奇怪。毕竟,一个世纪左右的时间似乎足以让尘埃落定。为什么这件事仍然被禁忌所笼罩?
Much of this present-day sensitivity stems from a backlash against the legacy of a Lithuanian-American archaeologist named Marija Gimbutas. In the 1960s and 1970s, Gimbutas was a leading authority on the later prehistory of eastern Europe. Nowadays, she is often represented as just as much of an oddball as psychiatric rebels like Otto Gross, accused of having attempted to revive the most ridiculous of old Victorian fantasies in modern guise. This is not only untrue (very few of those who dismiss her work seem to have actually read any of it), but it has created a situation where scholars find it difficult even to speculate as to how hierarchy and exploitation came to take root in the domestic sphere – unless one wants to return to Rousseau, and the simplistic notion that settled farming somehow automatically generated the power of husbands over wives and fathers over children.
今天的这种敏感性在很大程度上源于对立陶宛裔美洲考古学家 Marija Gimbutas 的遗产的反击。在 20 世纪 60 年代和 70 年代,金布塔斯是研究东欧后期史前史的主要权威。如今,她经常被视为与奥托·格罗斯(Otto Gross)等精神病学叛徒一样的怪人,被指责为试图以现代的名义恢复最荒谬的维多利亚时代的幻想。这不仅是不真实的(那些否定她的作品的人中,似乎很少有人真正读过她的作品),而且还造成了这样一种局面:学者们甚至很难推测等级制度和剥削是如何在家庭领域扎根的 —— 除非人们想回到卢梭那里,以及那种简单的概念,即定居的农业以某种方式自动产生丈夫对妻子和父亲对孩子的权力。
In fact, if you read the books of Gimbutas – such as The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1982) – you quickly realize that their author was attempting to do something which, until then, only men had been allowed to do: to craft a grand narrative for the origins of Eurasian civilization. She did so taking as her building blocks the very kind of ‘culture areas’ we discussed in the last chapter and using them to argue that, in some ways (though certainly not all), the old Victorian story about goddess-worshipping farmers and Aryan invaders was actually true.
事实上,如果你读了金布塔斯的书 —— 比如《旧欧洲的女神和上帝》(1982 年) —— 你很快就会意识到,他们的作者试图做一件在此之前只有男人才被允许做的事情:为欧亚文明的起源设计一个宏伟的叙事。她将我们在上一章中讨论的 “文化区” 作为她的基石,并利用它们来论证,在某些方面(尽管肯定不是全部),维多利亚时代关于崇拜女神的农民和雅利安入侵者的老故事实际上是真的。
Gimbutas was largely concerned with trying to understand the broad contours of a cultural tradition she referred to as ‘Old Europe’, a world of settled Neolithic villages centring on the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean (but also extending further north), in which, as Gimbutas saw it, men and women were equally valued, and differences of wealth and status were sharply circumscribed. Old Europe, by her estimation, endured from roughly 7000 BC to 3500 BC – which is, again, quite a respectable period of time. She believed these societies to be essentially peaceful, and argued that they shared a common pantheon under the tutelage of a supreme goddess, whose cult is attested in many hundreds of female figurines – some depicted with masks – found in Neolithic settlements, from the Middle East to the Balkans.7
Gimbutas 主要关注的是试图理解她称之为 “旧欧洲” 的文化传统的大致轮廓,这是一个以巴尔干半岛和地中海东部为中心的新石器时代定居村庄的世界(但也延伸到更北的地方),在 Gimbutas 看来,在这个世界上,男人和女人受到同等重视,财富和地位的差异被严格限制。根据她的估计,旧欧洲大约从公元前 7000 年持续到公元前 3500年 —— 这又是一段相当可敬的时间。她认为这些社会基本上是和平的,并认为他们在一位最高女神的指导下共享一个共同的万神殿,从中东到巴尔干地区的新石器时代定居点中发现的数百个女性塑像 —— 有些是带面具的 —— 都证明了对女神的崇拜。7
According to Gimbutas, ‘Old Europe’ came to a catastrophic end in the third millennium BC, when the Balkans were overrun by a migration of cattle-keeping peoples – the so-called ‘kurgan ’ folk – originating on the Pontic steppe, north of the Black Sea. Kurgan refers to the most archaeologically recognizable feature of these groups: earthen tumuli heaped over the graves of (typically male) warriors, buried with weapons and ornaments of gold, and with extravagant sacrifices of animals and occasionally also human ‘retainers’. All these features attested values antithetical to the communitarian ethos of Old Europe. The incoming groups were aristocratic and ‘androcratic’ (i.e., patriarchal), and were extremely warlike. Gimbutas considered them responsible for the westward spread of Indo-European languages, the establishment of new kinds of societies based on the radical subordination of women, and the elevation of warriors to a ruling caste.
根据 Gimbutas 的说法,“旧欧洲” 在公元前三千年走到了一个灾难性的尽头,当时巴尔干半岛被来自黑海以北的 Pontic 草原上的养牛民族 —— 所谓的 “Kurgan” —— 的移民所占领。库尔干人指的是这些群体在考古学上最容易辨认的特征:堆在(通常是男性)战士坟墓上的土墓,埋有武器和黄金装饰品,以及奢侈的动物祭品,偶尔也有人类 “仆人”。所有这些特征都证明了与旧欧洲的社区精神相悖的价值观。传入的群体是贵族和 “和氏璧”(即父权制),而且极其好战。金布塔斯认为他们应对印欧语言的西向传播、建立基于妇女的根本性从属地位的新型社会以及将战士提升为统治阶层负责。
As we’ve noted, all this bore a certain resemblance to the old Victorian fantasies – but there were key differences. The older version was rooted in an evolutionary anthropology that assumed matriarchy was the original condition of humankind because, at first, people supposedly didn’t understand physiological paternity and assumed women were single-handedly responsible for producing babies. This meant, of course, that hunter-gatherer communities before them should be just as matrilineal and matriarchal, if not more so, than early farmers – something many did indeed argue from first principles, despite a complete lack of any sort of evidence. Gimbutas, though, was not proposing anything of this sort: she was arguing for women’s autonomy and ritual priority in the Middle Eastern and European Neolithic. Yet by the 1990s many of her ideas had become a charter for ecofeminists, New Age religions and a host of other social movements; in turn, they inspired a slew of popular books, ranging from the philosophical to the ridiculous – and in the process became entangled with some of the more extravagant older Victorian ideas.
正如我们所注意到的,所有这些都与维多利亚时代的古老幻想有某种相似之处 —— 但也有关键的区别。旧版本植根于进化人类学,认为母权制是人类的原始状态,因为起初,人们应该不了解生理上的父子关系,并认为妇女要独自负责生产婴儿。当然,这意味着在他们之前的狩猎·采集者社区应该和早期农民一样是母系和母权制,甚至更多 —— 尽管完全缺乏任何种类的证据,但许多人确实从第一原则出发论证了这一点。然而,金布塔斯并没有提出任何这类建议:她在论证中东和欧洲新石器时代妇女的自主权和仪式优先权。然而,到 20 世纪 90 年代,她的许多想法已经成为生态女权主义者、新时代宗教和许多其他社会运动的宪章;反过来,它们又激发了一系列流行的书籍,从哲学到荒谬 —— 在这个过程中,与一些更奢侈的维多利亚时代的旧思想纠缠在一起。
Given all this, many archaeologists and historians concluded that Gimbutas was muddying the waters between scientific research and pop literature. Before long, she was being accused of just about everything the academy could think to throw at her: from cherry-picking evidence to failing to keep up with methodological advances; accusations of reverse sexism; or that she was indulging in ‘myth-making’. She was even subject to the supreme insult of public psychoanalysis, as leading academic journals published articles suggesting her theories about the displacement of Old Europe were basically phantasmagorical projections of her own tumultuous life experience, Gimbutas having fled her mother country, Lithuania, at the close of the Second World War in the wake of foreign invasions.8
鉴于这一切,许多考古学家和历史学家认为,金布塔斯在科学研究和流行文学之间混淆视听。不久之后,她就被指责为学术界能想到的一切:从偷换证据到未能跟上方法论的进步;被指责为反向性别歧视;或者说她沉溺于 “神话制造”。她甚至受到了公共精神分析的最高侮辱,因为主要的学术期刊发表文章,认为她关于旧欧洲的迁移的理论基本上是她自己动荡的生活经历的幻觉投射,Gimbutas 在第二次世界大战结束时在外国入侵后逃离了她的祖国立陶宛。8
Mercifully, perhaps, Gimbutas herself, who died in 1994, was not around to see most of this. But that also meant she was never able to respond. Some, maybe most of these criticisms had truth in them – though similar criticisms could no doubt be made of pretty much any archaeologist who makes a sweeping historical argument. Gimbutas’s arguments involved myth-making of a sort, which in part explains this wholesale takedown of her work by the academic community. But when male scholars engage in similar myth-making – and, as we have seen, they frequently do – they not only go unchallenged but often win prestigious literary prizes and have honorary lectures created in their name. Arguably Gimbutas was seen as meddling in, and quite consciously subverting, a genre of grand narrative that had been (and still is) entirely dominated by male writers such as ourselves. Yet her reward was not a literary prize, or even a place among the revered ancestors of archaeology; it was near-universal posthumous vilification, or, even worse, becoming an object of dismissive contempt.
庆幸的是,也许金布塔斯本人在 1994 年去世,没有看到这一切。但这也意味着她永远无法回应。这些批评中的一些,也许是大部分都有道理 —— 尽管类似的批评无疑可以针对几乎所有提出全面历史论证的考古学家。金布塔斯的论点涉及某种神话的制造,这在一定程度上解释了学术界对她作品的全盘否定。但是,当男性学者从事类似的神话制造时 —— 正如我们所看到的,他们经常这样做 —— 他们不仅没有受到质疑,而且经常赢得著名的文学奖,并以他们的名义开设荣誉讲座。可以说,金布塔斯被视为插手并相当有意识地颠覆了一种宏大叙事的体裁,这种体裁过去(现在仍然)完全由像我们这样的男性作家主导。然而,她的回报不是文学奖,甚至不是在受人尊敬的考古学祖先中占有一席之地;而是近乎普遍的死后中伤,或者更糟糕的是,成为被轻视的对象。
At least, until quite recently.
至少,直到最近。
Over the last few years, the analysis of ancient DNA – unavailable in Gimbutas’s time – has led a number of leading archaeologists to concede that at least one significant part of her reconstruction was probably right. If these new arguments, put forward on the basis of population genetics, are even broadly correct, then there really was an expansion of herding peoples from the grasslands north of the Black Sea around the time Gimbutas believed it to have happened: the third millennium BC . Some scholars are even arguing that massive migrations took place out of the Eurasian steppe at that time, leading to population replacement and perhaps the spread of Indo-European languages across large swathes of central Europe, just as Gimbutas envisaged. Others are far more cautious; but either way, after decades of virtual silence, people are suddenly talking about such issues, and hence about Gimbutas’s work, again.9
在过去的几年里,对古代DNA的分析 —— 在金姆布塔斯的时代是无法得到的 —— 已经导致一些领先的考古学家承认,她的重建至少有一个重要部分可能是正确的。如果这些在人口遗传学基础上提出的新论点是大致正确的,那么在金布塔斯认为发生的时间,即公元前三千年,确实有牧民从黑海以北的草原扩张。一些学者甚至认为,当时从欧亚草原上发生了大规模的移民,导致了人口更替,也许印欧语言在中欧的大片地区传播,就像金布塔斯设想的那样。其他人则要谨慎得多;但无论如何,在经历了几十年的实际沉默之后,人们突然又开始谈论这些问题,从而又开始谈论金布塔斯的工作。9
So what about the other half of Gimbutas’s argument, that Early Neolithic societies were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies? Before even beginning to answer this question, we need to clear up a few misconceptions. Gimbutas in fact never argued outright for the existence of Neolithic matriarchies. Indeed, the term seems to mean very different things to different authors. Insofar as ‘matriarchy’ describes a society where women hold a preponderance of formal political positions, one can indeed say this is exceedingly rare in human history. There are plenty of examples of individual women wielding real executive power, leading armies or creating laws, but few if any societies in which only women are normally expected to wield executive power or lead armies or create laws. Even strong queens like Elizabeth I of England, the Dowager Empress of China or Ranavalona I of Madagascar did not primarily appoint other women to be their chief advisors, commanders, judges and officials.
那么,Gimbutas 的另一半论点,即早期新石器时代的社会相对来说没有等级和阶级的问题呢?在开始回答这个问题之前,我们需要先澄清一些误解。Gimbutas 事实上从未直接论证过新石器时代母系社会的存在。事实上,这个词对不同的作者来说似乎意味着非常不同的东西。就 “母权制” 所描述的社会而言,妇女在正式的政治职位上占有优势,我们确实可以说这在人类历史上是极为罕见的。有很多女性个人掌握真正的行政权力、领导军队或制定法律的例子,但很少有社会通常期望只有女性掌握行政权力或领导军队或制定法律。即使像英国的伊丽莎白一世、中国的慈禧太后或马达加斯加的拉纳瓦罗纳一世这样强大的女王,也没有主要任命其他女性作为她们的首席顾问、指挥官、法官和官员。
In any case, another term – ‘gynarchy’, or ‘gynaecocracy’ – describes the political rule of women. The word ‘matriarchy’ means something rather different. There is a certain logic here: ‘patriarchy’, after all, refers not primarily to the fact that men wield public office, but first and foremost to the authority of patriarchs, that is, male heads of household – an authority which then acts as a symbolic model for, and economic basis of, male power in other fields of social life. Matriarchy might refer to an equivalent situation, in which the role of mothers in the household similarly becomes a model for, and economic basis of, female authority in other aspects of life (which doesn’t necessarily imply dominance in a violent or exclusionary sense), where women as a result hold a preponderance of overall day-to-day power.
在任何情况下,另一个术语 —— “妇权制”,或 “妇科制” —— 描述了妇女的政治统治。‘母权制’ 这个词的意思相当不同。这里有某种逻辑。毕竟,‘父权制’ 主要指的不是男性拥有公职的事实,而是首先指父权者的权威,即男性户主 —— 这种权威在社会生活的其他领域作为男性权力的象征模式和经济基础。母权制可能指的是一种类似的情况,在这种情况下,母亲在家庭中的作用同样成为女性在生活的其他方面的权威的模式和经济基础(这不一定意味着暴力或排他性意义上的统治),女性因此在日常的总体权力中占据了优势。
Looked at this way, matriarchies are real enough. Kandiaronk himself arguably lived in one. In his day, Iroquoian-speaking groups such as the Wendat lived in towns that were made up of longhouses of five or six families. Each longhouse was run by a council of women – the men who lived there did not have a parallel council of their own – whose members controlled all the key stockpiles of clothing, tools and food. The political sphere in which Kandiaronk himself moved was perhaps the only one in Wendat society where women did not predominate, and even so there existed women’s councils which held veto power over any decision of the male councils. On this definition, the Pueblo nations such as Hopi and Zuñi might also qualify as matriarchies, while the Minangkabau, a Muslim people of Sumatra, describe themselves as matriarchal for exactly the same reasons.10
从这个角度看,母系社会是足够真实的。Kandiaronk 本人可以说就生活在其中。在他的时代,像温达特人这样讲伊鲁古语的群体生活在由五六个家庭组成的长屋组成的城镇中。每个长屋都由一个妇女委员会管理 —— 住在那里的男人没有自己的平行委员会 —— 其成员控制着所有关键的衣服、工具和食物储备。坎迪阿伦克本人所处的政治领域也许是温达特社会中唯一一个妇女不占优势的领域,即使如此,也存在着妇女委员会,对男性委员会的任何决定拥有否决权。根据这一定义,诸如霍皮族和祖尼族这样的普埃布洛民族也可以被称为,而苏门答腊的穆斯林民族米南卡波族也因为完全相同的原因将自己描述为母系社会。10
True, such matriarchal arrangements are somewhat unusual – at least in the ethnographic record, which covers roughly the last 200 years. But once it’s clear that such arrangements can exist, we have no particular reason to exclude the possibility that they were more common in Neolithic times, or to assume that Gimbutas – by searching for them there – was doing something inherently fanciful or misguided. As with any hypothesis, it’s more a matter of weighing up the evidence.
的确,这种母系安排有些不寻常 —— 至少在人种学记录中是这样,它大约涵盖了过去的 200 年。但是,一旦明确了这种安排可以存在,我们就没有特别的理由排除它们在新石器时代更常见的可能性,或者认为金布塔斯 —— 在那里寻找它们 —— 在做一些固有的幻想或误导。与任何假设一样,这更像是一个权衡证据的问题。
Which takes us back to Çatalhöyük.
这让我们回到了恰塔霍裕克。
Recently, a number of discoveries among the miniature art of Çatalhöyük appear to show that the female form was a special focus of ritual attention, skilled artisanship and symbolic reflection on life and death. One is a clay figure with typically corpulent female front, transitioning at the back to a carefully modelled skeleton via arms that look emaciated. Its head, now lost, was fixed into a hole at the top. Another female figurine has a tiny cavity in the centre of her back, into which a single seed from a wild plant had been placed. And within a domestic platform of the sort used for burials, excavators found one particularly revealing and exquisitely carved limestone figure of a woman. Its detailed rendering clarifies an aspect of the more common figures made in clay: the sagging breasts, drooping belly and rolls of fat appear to signify not pregnancy, as once was believed, but age.11
最近,在恰塔霍裕克的微型艺术中的一些发现似乎表明,女性的形态是仪式关注的一个特别焦点,熟练的工匠精神和对生命和死亡的象征性思考。其中一个是一个泥塑,前面是典型的肥胖女性,后面通过手臂过渡到一个精心塑造的骨架,看起来很憔悴。它的头现在不见了,被固定在顶部的一个洞里。另一个女性雕像的背部中央有一个小洞,里面放着一粒野生植物的种子。在一个用于埋葬的家庭平台上,挖掘人员发现了一个特别显眼的、雕刻精美的石灰岩女性形象。它的详细渲染澄清了更常见的粘土雕像的一个方面:下垂的乳房、下垂的腹部和脂肪的滚动似乎并不像人们曾经认为的那样意味着怀孕,而是意味着年龄。11
Such findings suggest that the more ubiquitous female figurines, while clearly not all objects of worship, weren’t necessarily all dolls or toys either. Goddesses? Probably not. But quite possibly matriarchs of some sort, their forms revealing an interest in female elders. And no equivalent representations of male elders have been found. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should ignore the many other Neolithic figurines that have possible phallic attributes, or mixed male-female attributes, or that are so schematic we shouldn’t really try to identify them as male or female, or even as clearly human. Similarly, the occasional links between Neolithic figurines and masking – attested both in the Middle East and eastern Europe12 – may relate to occasions or performances where such categorical distinctions were deliberately blurred, or even inverted (not unlike, say, the masquerades of the Pacific Coast of North America, where the deities and those impersonating them were almost invariably male).
这样的发现表明,更普遍的女性塑像,虽然显然不全是崇拜对象,但也不一定全是娃娃或玩具。女神?可能不是。但很可能是某种形式的女族长,她们的形态显示出对女性长者的兴趣。而男性长者的相应表现形式还没有被发现。当然,这并不意味着我们应该忽视其他许多新石器时代的小雕像,这些雕像可能具有男性属性,或男女混合属性,或者是非常有计划性的,我们不应该真的尝试将它们识别为男性或女性,甚至是明显的人类。同样,新石器时代的小雕像和面具之间偶尔会有联系 —— 在中东和东欧都有证明12- 可能与这种分类区分被故意模糊,甚至颠倒的场合或表演有关(与北美太平洋海岸的化装舞会不同,那里的神灵和冒充他们的人几乎都是男性)。
There is no evidence that Çatalhöyük’s female inhabitants enjoyed better standards of living than its male ones. Detailed studies of human teeth and skeletons reveal a basic parity of diet and health, as does the ritual treatment of male and female bodies in death.13 Yet the point remains that there exist no similarly elaborate or highly crafted depictions of male forms in the portable art of Çatalhöyük. Wall decoration is another matter. Where coherent scenes emerge from the surviving murals, they are mainly concerned with the hunting and teasing of game animals such as boar, deer, bear and bulls. The participants are men and boys, apparently depicted in different stages of life, or perhaps entering those stages through the initiatory trials of the chase. Some of these spritely figures wear leopard skins; in one deer-baiting scene, all have beards.
没有证据表明恰塔霍裕克的女性居民比其男性居民享有更好的生活标准。对人类牙齿和骨骼的详细研究显示了饮食和健康方面的基本平等,正如男性和女性死亡时的仪式处理一样。13但问题是,在恰塔霍裕克的便携式艺术品中,并不存在类似的对男性形态的精心设计或高度制作的描绘。墙面装饰是另一回事。在现存的壁画中出现的连贯场景,主要是关于野猪、鹿、熊和公牛等猎物的狩猎和戏弄。参与者是男人和男孩,他们显然被描绘成处于人生的不同阶段,也可能是通过追逐的启蒙试验进入这些阶段。这些活泼的人物中有些穿着豹皮;在一个猎鹿的场景中,所有人都留着胡子。
One thing to emerge clearly from the newer investigations at Çatalhöyük is the way in which household organization permeates almost every aspect of social life. Despite the considerable size and density of the built-up area, there is no evidence for central authority. Each household appears more or less a world unto itself – a discrete locus of storage, production and consumption. Each also seems to have held a significant degree of control over its own rituals, especially where treatment of the dead was concerned, although ritual experts may of course have moved between them. While it’s unclear what social rules and habits were responsible for maintaining the autonomy of households, what seems evident is that these rules were learned mainly within the household itself; not just through its ceremonies, but also its micro-routines of cooking, cleaning floors, resurfacing walls with plaster, and so on.14 All this is vaguely reminiscent of the Northwest Coast, where society was a collection of great houses, except that the inhabitants of these Neolithic houses show no sign of being divided into ranks.
在恰塔霍裕克较新的调查中,有一点很明显,就是家庭组织几乎渗透到社会生活的各个方面。尽管建筑区的规模和密度都很大,但没有证据表明有中央权威。每户人家或多或少都是一个独立的世界 —— 一个独立的储存、生产和消费场所。每个家庭似乎都对自己的仪式有很大程度的控制,特别是在对待死者的问题上,当然,仪式专家也可能在他们之间流动。虽然目前还不清楚是什么社会规则和习惯负责维持家庭的自主性,但似乎很明显的是,这些规则主要是在家庭内部学习的;不仅是通过其仪式,还有其烹饪、清洁地板、用石膏重铺墙壁等微观程序。14所有这些都让人隐约想起西北海岸,那里的社会是一个大房子的集合,只是这些新石器时代的房子的居民没有显示出被分成等级的迹象。
The residents of Çatalhöyük seem to have placed great value on routine. We see this most clearly in the fastidious reproduction of domestic layouts over time. Individual houses were typically in use for between fifty and 100 years, after which they were carefully dismantled and filled in to make foundations for superseding houses. Clay wall went up on clay wall, in the same location, for century after century, over periods reaching up to a full millennium. Still more astonishing, smaller features such as mud-built hearths, ovens, storage bins and platforms often follow the same repetitive patterns of construction, over similarly long periods. Even particular images and ritual installations come back, again and again, in different renderings but the same locations, often widely separated in time.
恰塔霍裕克的居民似乎非常重视常规。我们从家庭布局的快速复制中最清楚地看到这一点。单个房屋通常使用 50 至 100 年,之后被小心翼翼地拆除并填埋,为下一个房屋打地基。粘土墙在同一地点,一个世纪接着一个世纪,时间长达一整千年。更令人惊讶的是,一些较小的特征,如泥土建造的炉灶、烤箱、储物箱和平台,在同样长的时间内,往往遵循同样的重复建造模式。甚至一些特定的图像和仪式装置也会一次又一次地出现在不同的效果中,但同样的地点,往往在时间上相距甚远。
Was Çatalhöyük, then, an ‘egalitarian society’? There is no sign of any self-conscious egalitarian ideal in the sense of, say, a concern with uniformity in the art, architecture or material culture; but neither are there many explicit signs of rank. Nonetheless, as individual houses built up histories, they also appear to have acquired a degree of cumulative prestige. This is reflected in a certain density of hunting trophies, burial platforms and obsidian – a dark volcanic glass, obtained from sources in the highlands of Cappadocia, some 125 miles north. The authority of long-lived houses seems consistent with the idea that elders, and perhaps elder women in particular, held positions of influence. But the more prestigious households are distributed among the less, and do not coalesce into elite neighbourhoods. In terms of gender relations, we can acknowledge a degree of symmetry, or at least complementarity. In pictorial art, masculine themes do not encompass the feminine, nor vice versa. If anything, the two domains seem to be kept apart, in different sectors of dwellings.
那么,恰塔霍裕克是一个 “平等主义社会” 吗?在艺术、建筑或物质文化的统一性方面,没有任何自觉的平等主义理想的迹象;但也没有许多明确的等级标志。尽管如此,随着个别房屋历史的建立,它们似乎也获得了一定程度的累积性威望。这反映在一定密度的狩猎战利品、墓台和黑曜石 —— 一种深色的火山玻璃,取自北部约 125 英里的卡帕多西亚高地。长寿家族的权威性似乎与长者,也许特别是长者女性拥有影响力地位的想法相一致。但较有声望的家庭分布在较少的家庭中,并没有凝聚成精英邻里。在性别关系方面,我们可以承认一定程度的对称性,或者至少是互补性。在绘画艺术中,男性的主题并不包括女性,反之亦然。如果有的话,这两个领域似乎是分开的,在住宅的不同部门。
What were the underlying realities of social life and labour at Çatalhöyük? Perhaps the most striking thing about all this art and ritual is that it makes almost no reference to agriculture. As we’ve noted, domestic cereals (wheat and barley) and livestock (sheep and goats) were far more important than wild resources in terms of nutrition. We know this because of organic remains recovered in quantity from every house. Yet for 1,000 years the cultural life of the community remained stubbornly oriented around the worlds of hunting and foraging. At this point, one has to ask how complete our picture of life at Çatalhöyük really is and where the largest gaps may lie.
恰塔霍裕克的社会生活和劳动的基本现实是什么?也许所有这些艺术和仪式中最引人注目的是,它几乎没有提到农业。正如我们所指出的,就营养而言,家养谷物(小麦和大麦)和牲畜(绵羊和山羊)比野生资源重要得多。我们之所以知道这一点,是因为从每座房子里都找到了大量的有机物。然而,一千年来,社区的文化生活仍然,顽固地围绕着狩猎和觅食的世界。在这一点上,人们不得不问,我们对恰塔霍裕克生活的描述到底有多完整,最大的差距可能在哪里。
Only something like 5 per cent of Neolithic Çatalhöyük has been excavated.15 Soundings and surveys offer no particular reason to believe that other parts of the town were substantially different, but it’s a reminder of how little we really know, and that we also have to think about what is missing from the archaeological record. For instance, it is clear that house floors were regularly swept clean, so the distribution of artefacts around them is far from a straightforward representation of past activities, which can only be reliably tracked through tiny fragments and residue embedded in the plaster.16 Traces have also been found of reed mats that covered living surfaces and furnishings, further disturbing the picture. We don’t necessarily know everything that was happening in the houses, or perhaps even half of it – or, indeed, how much time was actually spent living in these cramped and peculiar structures at all.
新石器时代的恰塔霍裕克只有大约 5% 的地方被挖掘出来。15探测和调查没有提供特别的理由来相信该镇的其他地区有很大的不同,但这提醒我们真正知道的东西很少,而且我们还必须思考考古记录中缺少的东西。例如,很明显,房子的地板是定期清扫的,所以周围的文物分布远不能直接代表过去的活动,只能通过嵌入石膏的微小碎片和残留物来可靠地追踪。16还发现了覆盖生活表面和家具的芦苇垫子的痕迹,进一步扰乱了画面。我们不一定知道房子里发生的所有事情,甚至可能不知道其中的一半 —— 或者说,实际上,在这些狭窄而奇特的结构中,究竟有多少时间是在居住。
In considering this, it’s worth taking a broader look at the site of Çatalhöyük in relation to its ancient surroundings, which archaeological science allows us to reconstruct, at least in outline. Çatalhöyük was situated in an area of wetlands (whence all the mud and clay) seasonally flooded by the Çarşamba River, which split its course as it entered the Konya Plain. Swamps would have surrounded the site for much of the year, interspersed with raised areas of dry land. Winters were cold and damp, summers oppressively hot. From spring to autumn, sheep and goats would have been moved between areas of pasture within the plain, and sometimes further into the highlands. Arable crops were most likely sown late in the spring on the receding floodplain of the Çarşamba, where they could ripen in as little as three months, with harvesting and processing in the late summer: fast-growing grains, in the season of Adonis.17
在考虑这个问题时,值得对恰塔霍裕克遗址与它的古代环境进行更广泛的考察,考古学允许我们至少在轮廓上进行重建。恰塔霍裕克位于一个湿地地区(所有的泥土和粘土都来自这里),季节性地被进入科尼亚平原的恰尔桑巴河淹没。沼泽地在一年中的大部分时间里都围绕着这个地方,中间夹杂着高大的旱地区域。冬天寒冷潮湿,夏天热得令人窒息。从春天到秋天,绵羊和山羊会在平原上的牧区之间移动,有时会进一步进入高地。耕地作物很可能在春末播种在卡尔桑巴河的退水平原上,它们可以在短短三个月内成熟,在夏末收获和加工:快速生长的谷物,在阿多尼斯的季节。17
While all these tasks may have taken place quite close to the town, they will inevitably have involved a periodic dispersal and reconfiguration of working arrangements and of general social affairs. And, as the rites of Adonis remind us, another kind of social life altogether may have existed on the rooftops. It is in fact quite likely that what we are seeing in the surviving remains of Çatalhöyük’s built environment are largely the social arrangements prevalent in winter, with their intense and distinctive ceremonialism focused upon hunting and the veneration of the dead. At that time of year, with the harvest in, the organization required for agricultural labour would have given way to a different type of social reality as the community’s life shrank back towards its houses, just as its herds of sheep and goats shrank back into the confines of their pens.
虽然所有这些任务都可能发生在城镇附近,但它们不可避免地涉及工作安排和一般社会事务的定期分散和重新配置。而且,正如阿多尼斯的仪式提醒我们的那样,屋顶上可能存在着另一种社会生活。事实上,我们在恰塔霍裕克建筑环境的遗迹中看到的很可能是冬季普遍存在的社会安排,其强烈而独特的仪式感集中在狩猎和对死者的敬仰。在每年的那个时候,随着收获的到来,农业劳动所需的组织会让位于另一种社会现实,因为社区的生活会缩回到它的房子里,就像它的羊群会缩回到它们的围栏里。
Seasonal variations of social structure18 were alive and well at Çatalhöyük, and these carefully balanced alternations seem central to understanding why the town endured. An impressive degree of material equality prevailed in the everyday exchanges of family life, within and between houses. Yet at the same time, hierarchy developed to slower rhythms, played out in rituals that joined the living to the dead. Shepherding and cultivation surely involved a strict division of labour, to safeguard the annual crop and protect the herds – but if so it found little space in the ceremonial life of the household, which drew its energy from older sources, more Adonis than Demeter.
社会结构的季节性变化18在恰塔霍裕克,社会结构的季节性变化是活生生的,而这些精心平衡的交替似乎是理解该镇为何能持续存在的核心。在家庭生活的日常交流中,房屋内部和房屋之间普遍存在着令人印象深刻的物质平等。然而,与此同时,等级制度的发展节奏较慢,在连接生者和死者的仪式中得到了体现。牧羊和耕种肯定涉及到严格的劳动分工,以保护每年的庄稼和保护牛群 —— 但如果是这样的话,它在家庭的仪式生活中几乎找不到空间,它从更古老的来源汲取能量,更多的是阿多尼斯而不是德墨忒尔。
A certain controversy has arisen, however, concerning just where the people of Çatalhöyük planted their crops. At first, microscopic studies of cereal remains suggested a dry-land location. Given the known extent of ancient swamps in the Konya basin, this would imply that arable fields were located at least eight miles from the town, which hardly seems plausible in the absence of donkeys or ox carts (remember, cattle were not yet domesticated in this region, let alone harnessed to anything). Subsequent analyses support a more local setting, on the alluvial soils of the Çarşamba floodplain.19 The distinction is important for a variety of reasons, not just ecological but also historical, even political, because how we picture its practical realities has direct implications for how we view the social consequences of Neolithic farming.
然而,关于恰塔霍裕克人在哪里种植庄稼的问题出现了一定的争论。起初,对谷物残骸的显微镜研究表明,这是一个旱地位置。考虑到科尼亚盆地已知的古代沼泽地的范围,这意味着可耕地距离该镇至少有 8 英里,在没有驴子或牛车的情况下,这似乎很难说得通(记住,牛在这个地区还没有被驯化,更不用说被束缚在任何东西上)。随后的分析支持更多的当地环境,即在卡尔桑巴洪泛区的冲积土壤上。19这种区分是很重要的,原因有很多,不仅是生态方面的,还有历史方面的,甚至是政治方面的,因为我们如何描绘它的实际情况,对我们如何看待新石器时代农业的社会后果有直接影响。
We must take an even broader perspective to see exactly why.
我们必须从更广泛的角度来看看到底是什么原因。
When Çatalhöyük was first investigated, in the 1960s, the striking discovery of houses lined with cattle skulls led many to assume, quite reasonably, that the plain of Konya was an early cradle of animal domestication. These days it is known that cattle (and boar) were first domesticated 1,000 years before Çatalhöyük was founded, and in another location altogether: around the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, which lie further east into Asia, within the area known as the Fertile Crescent. It was from that general direction that the founders of Çatalhöyük obtained the basis of their farming economy, including domestic cereals, pulses, sheep and goats. But they didn’t adopt domestic cattle or pigs. Why not?
在 20 世纪 60 年代首次对恰塔霍裕克进行调查时,令人震惊的是发现了两边都是牛头骨的房屋,这使得许多人有理由认为,科尼亚平原是早期动物驯化的摇篮。如今,人们知道,牛(和野猪)是在恰塔霍裕克建城前 1000 年首次被驯化的,而且是在另一个地方:底格里斯河和幼发拉底河流域的上游,该地区位于亚洲东部,在被称为新月沃土的地区。恰塔霍裕克的创始人正是从这个大方向上获得了他们农业经济的基础,包括家用谷物、豆类、绵羊和山羊。但他们没有采用家养的牛或猪。为什么不呢?
Since no environmental obstacles were present, one has to assume an element of cultural refusal here. The best contender for an explanation is also the most obvious. As Çatalhöyük’s art and ritual suggests, wild cattle and boar were highly valued as prey, and probably had been for as long as anyone could remember. In terms of prestige, there was much to be lost, perhaps especially for men, by the prospect of surrounding these dangerous animals with more docile, domestic varieties. Allowing cattle to remain exclusively in their ancient wild form – a big beast, but also lean, fast and highly impressive – also meant keeping intact a certain sort of human society. Accordingly, cattle remained wild and glamorous until around 6000 BC .20
由于不存在环境障碍,人们不得不假设这里有文化拒绝的因素。解释的最佳人选也是最明显的。正如恰塔霍裕克的艺术和仪式所表明的那样,野牛和野猪作为猎物被高度重视,而且可能从人们有记忆以来就一直如此。就声望而言,用更温顺的家养动物包围这些危险的动物,会有很多损失,也许对男人来说尤其如此。允许牛只保持其古老的野生形态 —— 一种大型野兽,但也是瘦小、快速和令人印象深刻的 —— 也意味着保持某种人类社会的完整。因此,直到公元前 6000 年左右,牛一直保持着野生和迷人的状态。20
So, what exactly is, or was, the Fertile Crescent? First, it’s important to note that this is a completely modern concept, the origins of which are as much geopolitical as environmental. The term Fertile Crescent was invented in the nineteenth century, when Europe’s imperial powers were carving up the Middle East according to their own strategic interests. Partly because of the close ties between archaeology, ancient history and the modern institutions of empire, the term became widely adopted among researchers to describe an area from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean (modern Palestine, Israel and Lebanon) to the foothills of the Zagros Mountains (roughly the Iran–Iraq border), crossing parts of Syria, Turkey and Iraq on the way. Now it is only prehistorians who still use it, to indicate the region where farming began: a roughly crescent-shaped belt of arable lands bounded by deserts and mountains.21
那么,新月沃土到底是什么,或者曾经是什么?首先,需要注意的是,这是一个完全现代的概念,它的起源是地缘政治和环境。新月沃土一词是在 19 世纪发明的,当时欧洲的帝国主义列强根据自己的战略利益对中东进行分割。部分原因是考古学、古代历史和现代帝国机构之间的密切联系,这个词在研究人员中被广泛采用,用来描述从地中海东岸(现代巴勒斯坦、以色列和黎巴嫩)到扎格罗斯山麓(大约是伊朗和伊拉克的边界)的地区,沿途跨越叙利亚、土耳其和伊拉克的部分地区。,现在只有史前学家仍在使用这个词,以表示农业开始的地区:一个由沙漠和山脉环绕的大致新月形的耕地地带。21
Yet in ecological terms, it’s really not one crescent but two – or no doubt even more, depending how closely one chooses to look. At the end of the last glacial period, around 10,000 BC, this region developed in two clearly distinct directions. Going with the topography, we can discern an ‘upland crescent’ and a ‘lowland crescent’. The upland crescent follows the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains, running north of the modern border between Syria and Turkey. For foragers at the end of the last Ice Age, it would have been something of an open frontier; an expanding belt of oak-pistachio forest and game-rich prairie intersected by river valleys.22 The lowland crescent to the south was characterized by Pistacia woodlands, as well as tracts of fertile terrain bound tightly to river systems or to the shores of lakes and artesian springs, beyond which lay deserts and barren plateaus.23
然而,从生态学的角度来看,它确实不是一个月牙,而是两个 —— 或者毫无疑问甚至更多,这取决于人们选择如何仔细观察。在最后一个冰川期结束时,大约在公元前 10000 年,这个地区向两个明显不同的方向发展。从地形上看,我们可以看出一个 “高地新月” 和一个 “低地新月”。高地新月形沿着金牛座和扎格罗斯山脉的山麓,在现代叙利亚和土耳其之间的边界以北运行。对于上个冰河时代结束时的狩猎者来说,这将是一个开放的边界;一个不断扩大的橡树·开心果森林和富含动物的草原带,与河谷交错。22南部的低地新月形地带的特点是有开心果林地,以及与河流系统或湖泊和自流泉岸边紧密相连的大片肥沃的土地,在这些土地之外是沙漠和贫瘠的高原。23
Between 10,000 and 8000 BC, foraging societies in the ‘upland’ and ‘lowland’ sectors of the Fertile Crescent underwent marked transformations, but in quite different directions. The differences cannot easily be expressed in terms of modes of subsistence or habitation. In both regions, in fact, we find a complex mosaic of human settlement: villages, hamlets, seasonal camps and centres of ritual and ceremonial activity marked out by impressive public buildings. Both regions, too, have produced varying degrees of evidence for plant cultivation and livestock management, within a broader spectrum of hunting and foraging activities. Yet there are also cultural differences, some so striking as to suggest a process of schismogenesis, of the sort we described in the previous chapter. It might even be argued that, after the last Ice Age, the ecological frontier between ‘lowland’ and ‘upland’ Fertile Crescent also became a cultural frontier with zones of relative uniformity on either side, distinguished almost as sharply as the ‘Protestant foragers’ and ‘fisher kings’ of the Pacific Coast.
在公元前 10000 年到 8000 年之间,新月沃土的 “高地” 和 “低地” 的觅食社会经历了明显的转变,但方向完全不同。这些差异不容易用生存或居住模式来表达。事实上,在这两个地区,我们都发现了复杂的人类居住环境:村庄、小村庄、季节性营地以及以令人印象深刻的公共建筑为标志的仪式和礼仪活动中心。在更广泛的狩猎和觅食活动中,这两个地区也都产生了不同程度的植物种植和牲畜管理证据。然而,这两个地区也存在文化差异,有些差异非常明显,以至于表明存在着我们在前一章中描述的那种分裂过程。甚至可以说,在上个冰期之后,“低地” 和 “高地” 新月沃土之间的生态边界也成为文化边界,两边都有相对统一的区域,其区别几乎和太平洋沿岸的 “新教觅食者” 和 “渔王” 一样明显。
In the uplands, there was a striking turn towards hierarchy among settled hunter-foragers, most dramatically attested at the megalithic centre of Göbekli Tepe and at nearby sites like that recently discovered at Karahan Tepe. In the lowlands of the Euphrates and Jordan valleys, by contrast, such megalithic monuments are absent, and Neolithic societies followed a distinct but equally precocious path of change, which we will shortly describe. What’s more, these two adjacent families of societies – let’s call them ‘lowlanders’ and ‘uplanders’ – were well acquainted. We know this because they traded durable materials with each other over long distances, among them the same materials, in fact, that we found circulating as valuables on the West Coast of North America: obsidian and minerals from the mountains, and mollusc shells from the coasts. Obsidian from the Turkish highlands flowed south, and shells (perhaps used as currency) flowed north from the shores of the Red Sea, ensuring that uplanders and lowlanders stayed in touch.24
在高原地区,定居的猎人·觅食者中出现了惊人的等级制度转变,Göbekli Tepe 的巨石中心和附近的遗址(如最近在 Karahan Tepe 发现的遗址)就是最显著的证明。相反,在幼发拉底河和约旦河的低地,没有这样的巨石纪念碑,新石器时代的社会遵循一个独特但同样早熟的变化路径,我们很快就会描述。更重要的是,这两个相邻的社会家族 —— 我们称它们为 “低地人” 和 “高地人” —— 是很熟悉的。我们知道这一点,因为他们远距离地相互交易耐用材料,事实上,在这些材料中,我们发现了在北美西海岸作为贵重物品流通的相同材料:山区的黑曜石和矿物,以及沿海的软体动物外壳。来自土耳其高原的黑曜石流向南方,而贝壳(也许被用作货币)从红海海岸流向北方,确保高地人和低地人保持联系。24
The routes of this prehistoric trade circuit contracted as they progressed southwards into less evenly populated areas, starting at the Syrian bend of the Euphrates, winding through the Damascus basin and down into the Jordan valley. This route formed the so-called ‘Levantine Corridor’. And the lowlanders who lived here were devoted craft specialists and traders. Each hamlet seems to have developed its own expertise (stone-grinding, bead-carving, shell-processing and so on), and industries were often associated with special ‘cult buildings’ or seasonal lodges, pointing to the control of such skills by guilds or secret societies. By the ninth millennium BC, larger settlements had developed along the principal trade routes. Lowland foragers occupied fertile pockets of land among the drainages of the Jordan valley, using trade wealth to support increasingly large, settled populations. Sites of impressive scale sprang up in such propitious locations, some, such as Jericho and Basta, approaching ten hectares in size.25
这个史前贸易圈的路线在向南推进到人口不太均匀的地区时有所收缩,从幼发拉底河的叙利亚拐弯处开始,蜿蜒穿过大马士革盆地,并向下进入约旦河谷。这条路线形成了所谓的 “黎凡特走廊”。而生活在这里的低地人是忠实的手工艺专家和商人。每个村落似乎都发展了自己的专长(石磨、珠子雕刻、贝壳加工等等),而且这些行业往往与特殊的 “崇拜建筑” 或季节性住所有关,表明这些技能由行会或秘密社团控制。到了公元前九千年,在主要的贸易路线上已经形成了较大的定居点。低地觅食者在约旦河谷的排水沟中占据了肥沃的小块土地,利用贸易财富来支持越来越多的定居人口。在这些有利的地方出现了规模惊人的遗址,有些遗址,如杰里科和巴斯塔,面积接近 10 公顷。25
To understand the importance of trade in this process is to appreciate that the lowland crescent was a landscape of intimate contrasts and conjunctures (very similar, in this respect, to California). There were constant opportunities for foragers to exchange complementary products – which included foods, medicines, drugs and cosmetics – since the local growth cycles of wild resources were staggered by sharp differences in climate and topography.26 Farming itself seems to have started in precisely this way, as one of so many ‘niche’ activities or local forms of specialization. The founder crops of early agriculture – among them emmer wheat, einkorn, barley and rye – were not domesticated in a single ‘core’ area (as once supposed), but at different stops along the Levantine Corridor, scattered from the Jordan valley to the Syrian Euphrates, and perhaps further north as well.27
要理解贸易在这一过程中的重要性,就必须认识到,低地新月形地区是一个充满强烈对比和冲突的景观(在这方面,与加利福尼亚非常相似)。由于当地野生资源的生长周期因气候和地形的巨大差异而错开,因此,觅食者不断有机会交换互补产品,包括食品、药品、药物和化妆品。26农业本身似乎正是以这种方式开始的,作为许多 “利基” 活动或当地的专业化形式之一。 早期农业的创始作物 —— 其中包括艾美尔小麦、艾克尔小麦、大麦和黑麦 —— 并不是在一个单一的 “核心” 地区驯化的(像曾经认为的那样),而是在黎凡特走廊的不同地点,从约旦河谷分散到叙利亚幼发拉底河,也许还包括更北的地方。27
At higher altitudes, in the upland crescent, we find some of the earliest evidence for the management of livestock (sheep and goats in western Iran, cattle too in eastern Anatolia), incorporated into seasonal rounds of hunting and foraging.28 Cereal cultivation began in a similar way, as a fairly minor supplement to economies based mainly on wild resources: nuts, berries, legumes and other readily accessible foodstuffs. Cultivation, however, is rarely just about calories. Cereal production also brought people together in new ways to perform communal tasks, mostly repetitive, labour-intensive and no doubt freighted with symbolic meaning; and the resulting foods were incorporated into their ceremonial lives. At the site of Jerf el-Ahmar, on the banks of the Syrian Euphrates – where upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent converge – the storage and processing of grain was associated less with ordinary dwellings than with subterranean lodges, entered from an opening in the roof and suffused with ritual associations.29
在海拔较高的新月形高地,我们发现了一些最早的牲畜管理证据(伊朗西部的绵羊和山羊,安纳托利亚东部的牛),它们被纳入季节性的狩猎和觅食活动中。28谷物种植也以类似的方式开始,作为主要基于野生资源的经济的一个相当小的补充:坚果、浆果、豆类和其他容易获得的食物。然而,种植很少只是为了获得卡路里。谷物生产也使人们以新的方式聚集在一起,执行社区任务,这些任务大多是重复性的、劳动密集型的,而且无疑具有象征意义;由此产生的食物被纳入他们的仪式生活中。在叙利亚幼发拉底河畔的杰夫·艾哈迈尔(Jerf el-Ahmar)遗址 —— 新月沃土的高地和低地交汇处 —— 谷物的储存和加工与其说是与普通住宅相关,不如说是与地下建筑相关,从屋顶的一个开口进入,充满了仪式感。29
Before exploring some further contrasts between lowlanders and uplanders, it seems important to consider in a little more detail what these very earliest kinds of farming were actually like. To do this, we have to go deeper into the process of domestication.
在探讨低地人和高地人之间的一些进一步对比之前,似乎有必要更详细地考虑一下这些最早期的耕作方式究竟是什么样的。要做到这一点,我们必须深入了解驯化的过程。
In crops, domestication is what happens when plants under cultivation lose features that allow them to reproduce in the wild. Among the most important is the facility to disperse seed without human assistance. In wheat, seeds growing on the stalk are contained by tiny aerodynamic capsules known as spikelets. As wild wheat ripens, the connection between spikelet and stem (an element called the rachis) shatters. The spikelets free themselves and fall to the ground. Their spiky ends penetrate the soil, deep enough for at least some seed to survive and grow (the other ends project upwards, equipped with bristle-like awns to deter birds, rodents and browsing animals).
在农作物方面,驯化是指栽培的植物失去了使其在野外繁殖的特征。其中最重要的是在没有人类帮助的情况下散播种子的能力。在小麦中,生长在茎秆上的种子被称为小穗的微小空气动力胶囊所容纳。当野生小麦成熟时,小穗和茎之间的连接(一种称为轴的元素)就会破碎。小穗释放出来,落到地上。它们的尖刺末端穿透土壤,足以让至少一些种子存活和生长(其他末端向上凸起,配备有鬃毛状突起,以阻止鸟类、啮齿动物和浏览动物)。
In domestic varieties, these aids to survival are lost. A genetic mutation takes place, switching off the mechanism for spontaneous seed dispersal and turning wheat from a hardy survivor into a hopeless dependant. Unable to separate from its mother plant, the rachis becomes a locus of attachment. Instead of spreading out to take on the big bad world, the spikelets stay rigidly fixed to the top part of the stem (the ‘ear’). And there they remain, until someone comes along to harvest them, or until they rot, or are eaten by animals. So how did these genetic and behavioural changes in crops come about, how long did it take, and what had to happen in human societies to make them possible? Historians sometimes like to turn this question on its head. It is wheat, they remind us, that has domesticated people, just as much as people ever domesticated wheat.
在国内的品种中,这些生存的辅助手段已经消失。发生了基因突变,关闭了种子自发传播的机制,使小麦从一个顽强的生存者变成一个无望的依赖者。由于无法与母株分离,轴变成了一个附着点。小穗并不向外扩展,以应对这个大坏世界,而是僵硬地固定在茎的顶部(“穗”)。它们一直呆在那里,直到有人来收获它们,或者直到它们腐烂,或者被动物吃掉。那么,作物的这些遗传和行为变化是如何产生的,花了多长时间,人类社会中又发生了什么,使之成为可能?历史学家有时喜欢把这个问题反过来问。他们提醒我们,是小麦驯化了人类,就像人类驯化了小麦一样。
Yuval Harari waxes eloquent on this point, asking us to think ‘for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat’. Ten thousand years ago, he points out, wheat was just another form of wild grass, of no special significance; but within the space of a few millennia it was growing over large parts of the planet. How did it happen? The answer, according to Harari, is that wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. ‘This ape’, he writes, ‘had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat.’ If wheat didn’t like stones, humans had to clear them from their fields; if wheat didn’t want to share its space with other plants, people were obliged to labour under the hot sun weeding them out; if wheat craved water, people had to lug it from one place to another, and so on.30
尤瓦尔·哈拉里在这一点上滔滔不绝,要求我们 “从小麦的角度来思考一下农业革命”。他指出,一万年前,小麦只是另一种形式的野草,没有什么特别的意义;但在几千年的时间里,它却在地球的大部分地区生长。它是如何发生的呢?哈拉里认为,答案是,小麦通过操纵智人来实现其优势。他写道:“这种人猿”,“在大约 1 万年前,一直过着相当舒适的狩猎和采集生活,但后来开始在种植小麦方面投入越来越多的精力。如果小麦不喜欢石头,人类就必须把它们从田里清除出去;如果小麦不想与其他植物分享空间,人们就不得不在烈日下劳动,把它们除掉;如果小麦渴望水,人们就必须把它从一个地方拖到另一个地方,等等。30
There’s something ineluctable about all this. But only if we accept the premise that it does in fact make sense to look at the whole process ‘from the viewpoint of wheat’. On reflection, why should we? Humans are very large-brained and intelligent primates and wheat is, well … a sort of grass. Of course, there are non-human species that have, in a sense, domesticated themselves – the house mouse and sparrow are among them, and so too probably the dog, all found, incidentally, in Early Neolithic villages of the Middle East. It’s also undoubtedly true that, over the long term, ours is a species that has become enslaved to its crops: wheat, rice, millet and corn feed the world, and it’s hard to envisage modern life without them.
这一切都有一些不可避免的东西。但前提是我们接受这样一个前提,即 “从小麦的角度” 看整个过程确实有意义。仔细想想,我们为什么要这样做?人类是大脑非常发达的智能灵长类动物,而小麦是…… 一种草。当然,从某种意义上说,有些非人类物种已经驯化了自己 —— 家鼠和麻雀是其中之一,狗也可能是其中之一,所有这些都是在中东的早期新石器时代的村庄中发现的。毋庸置疑的是,从长远来看,我们的物种已经被其作物所奴役:小麦、水稻、小米和玉米养活了世界,很难设想没有它们的现代生活。
But to make sense of the beginnings of Neolithic farming, we surely need to try and see it from the perspective of the Palaeolithic, not of the present, and still less from the viewpoint of some imaginary race of bourgeois ape-men. Of course, this is harder to do, but the alternative is to slip back into the realms of myth-making: retelling the past as a ‘just-so’ story, which makes our present situation seem somehow inevitable or preordained. Harari’s retelling is appealing, we suggest, not because it’s based on any evidence, but because we’ve heard it a thousand times before, just with a different cast of characters. In fact, many of us have been hearing it from infancy. Once again, we’re back in the Garden of Eden. Except now, it’s not a wily serpent who tricks humanity into sampling the forbidden fruit of knowledge. It’s the fruit itself (i.e. the cereal grains).
,但要理解新石器时代农业的开端,我们肯定需要尝试从旧石器时代的角度来看待它,而不是从现在的角度,更不是从一些想象中的资产阶级猿人种族的角度。当然,这是很难做到的,但另一种选择是回到神话制造的领域:把过去作为一个 “公正” 的故事来重述,这使得我们现在的情况似乎在某种程度上是不可避免的或预先注定的。我们认为,哈拉里的重述很吸引人,不是因为它基于任何证据,而是因为我们之前已经听过无数次了,只是换了一群不同的人物。事实上,我们中的许多人从婴儿期就开始听到它。我们又一次回到了伊甸园。只是现在,不是一个狡猾的蛇欺骗人类去品尝知识的禁果。而是水果本身(即谷物)。
We already know how this one goes. Humans were once living a ‘fairly comfortable life’, subsisting from the blessings of Nature, but then we made our most fatal mistake. Lured by the prospect of a still easier life – of surplus and luxury, of living like gods – we had to go and tamper with that harmonious State of Nature, and thus unwittingly turned ourselves into slaves.
我们已经知道这个问题是如何发生的。人类曾经过着 “相当舒适的生活”,靠大自然的恩赐维持生计,但后来我们犯了最致命的错误。在更容易的生活前景的诱惑下 —— 剩余和奢侈,像神一样生活 —— 我们不得不去破坏和谐的自然状态,从而不知不觉地把自己变成了奴隶。
What happens if we put aside this fable and consider what botanists, geneticists and archaeologists have found out in the past few decades? Let’s focus on wheat and barley.
如果我们抛开这个寓言,考虑一下植物学家、遗传学家和考古学家在过去几十年里的发现,会发生什么?让我们专注于小麦和大麦。
After the last Ice Age, these particular crops were among the first to be domesticated, along with lentils, flax, peas, chickpeas and bitter vetch. As we’ve noted, this process occurred in various different parts of the Fertile Crescent, rather than a single centre. Wild varieties of some of these crops grow there today, giving researchers the chance to make direct observations about how those plants behave, and even to reconstruct certain aspects of the technical process that led, 10,000 years ago, to domestication. Armed with such knowledge, they can also examine actual remains of ancient seeds and other plant remains, recovered in the many hundreds from archaeological sites in the same region. Scientists can then compare the biological process of domestication (reproduced under technological conditions similar to those of Neolithic cultivation) with the actual process that took place in prehistoric times and see how they match up.
在上个冰河时期之后,这些特殊的作物与小扁豆、亚麻、豌豆、鹰嘴豆和苦苣一起,成为第一批被驯化的作物。正如我们所指出的,这一过程发生在新月沃土的不同地区,而不是单一的中心。今天,其中一些作物的野生品种在那里生长,使研究人员有机会对这些植物的行为方式进行直接观察,甚至可以重建一万年前导致驯化的技术过程的某些方面。有了这些知识,他们还可以检查从同一地区的考古遗址中发现的数以百计的古代种子和其他植物的实际遗迹。然后,科学家们可以将驯化的生物过程(在类似于新石器时代栽培的技术条件下再现)与发生在史前时代的实际过程进行比较,看看它们如何吻合。
Once cultivation became widespread in Neolithic societies, we might expect to find evidence of a relatively quick or at least continuous transition from wild to domestic forms of cereals (which is exactly what terms like the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ lead us to think), but in fact this is not at all what the results of archaeological science show. And despite the Middle Eastern setting, those findings do not add up to anything remotely resembling a Garden of Eden-type story about how humans haplessly stumbled their way into a Faustian pact with wheat. Just how far we are (or should be) from that kind of story was already clear to researchers some decades ago, once they began comparing actual prehistoric rates of crop domestication to those achieved under experimental conditions.
一旦种植业在新石器时代的社会中得到普及,我们可能会期望找到证据,证明从野生谷物到家用谷物的相对快速或至少持续的过渡(这正是像 “农业革命” 这样的术语让我们认为的),但事实上,这根本不是考古科学的结果。尽管是在中东地区,但这些发现并不像一个伊甸园式的故事,即人类是如何无缘无故地与小麦达成浮士德式的协议。几十年前,当研究人员开始将实际的史前作物驯化率与实验条件下的驯化率进行比较时,我们离那种故事有多远(或应该有多远)已经很清楚了。
Experiments of this kind with wild wheat were first undertaken in the 1980s.31 What they showed was that the key genetic mutation leading to crop domestication could be achieved in as little as twenty to thirty years, or at most 200 years, using simple harvesting techniques like reaping with flint sickles or uprooting by hand. All it would have taken, then, is for humans to follow the cues provided by the crops themselves. That meant harvesting after they began to ripen, doing it in ways that left the grain on the stem (e.g. cutting or pulling, as opposed to beating grain straight off the ear with a paddle), sowing new seed on virgin soil (away from wild competitors), learning from errors, and repeating the winning formula next year. For foragers seasoned in the harvesting of wild crops, these changes need not have posed major logistical or conceptual challenges. And there may also have been other good reasons to harvest wild cereals in this manner, besides obtaining food.
在 20 世纪 80 年代首次对野生小麦进行了此类实验。31这些实验表明,使用简单的收割技术,如用燧石镰刀收割或用手拔草,可以在短短二三十年内实现导致作物驯化的关键基因突变,或者最多 200 年。那么,所需要的就是人类遵循作物本身所提供的提示。这意味着在作物开始成熟后进行收割,收割时要把谷物留在茎上(如切割或拔出,而不是用桨直接把谷物从穗上打下来),在处女地(远离野生竞争者)播种新的种子,从错误中学习,并在下一年重复成功的公式。对于在收获野生作物方面经验丰富的村民来说,这些变化并不需要构成重大的后勤或概念上的挑战。除了获得食物之外,以这种方式收获野生谷物还可能有其他好的理由。
Harvesting by sickle yields straw as well as grain. Today we consider straw a by-product of cereal-farming, the primary purpose being to produce food. But archaeological evidence suggests things started the other way round.32 Human populations in the Middle East began settling in permanent villages long before cereals became a major component of their diets.33 In doing so, they found new uses for the stalks of wild grasses; these included fuel for lighting fires, and the temper that transformed mud and clay from so much friable matter into a vital tectonic resource, used to build houses, ovens, storage bins and other fixed structures. Straw could also be used to make baskets, clothing, matting and thatch. As people intensified the harvesting of wild grasses for straw (either by sickle or simply uprooting), they also produced one of the key conditions for some of these grasses to lose their natural mechanisms of seed dispersal.
用镰刀收割会产生秸秆和谷物。今天,我们认为稻草是谷物种植的副产品,主要目的是为了生产粮食。但考古学证据表明,事情的开始是相反的。32早在谷物成为他们饮食的主要组成部分之前,中东地区的人类就已经开始在永久性村庄定居。33在这样做的过程中,他们发现了野草茎的新用途;这些用途包括点火的燃料,以及将泥土和粘土从如此多的易碎物质转化为重要的构造资源,用于建造房屋、烤箱、储物箱和其他固定结构。稻草还可以用来制作篮子、衣服、垫子和茅草。由于人们加强了对野生草的收割,以获取秸秆(无论是用镰刀还是简单的连根拔起),他们也为一些草类失去其自然的种子传播机制创造了关键条件之一。
Now here’s the key point: if crops, rather than humans, had been setting the pace, these two processes would have gone hand in hand, leading to the domestication of large-seeded grasses within a few decades. Wheat would have gained its human handmaidens, and humans would have gained a plant resource that could be efficiently harvested with little loss of seed and that was eminently storable, but that also required much greater outlays of labour in the form of land management and the post-harvesting work of threshing and winnowing (a process which occurs naturally in wild cereals). Within a few human generations, the Faustian pact between people and crops would have been sealed. But here again, the evidence flatly contradicts these expectations.
现在的关键点是:如果是作物而不是人类在引领潮流,这两个过程就会齐头并进,在几十年内导致大种子草的驯化。小麦将获得它的人类助手,而人类将获得一种可以有效收割且种子损失很小的植物资源,这种资源非常容易储存,但也需要更多的劳动力,如土地管理和收割后的脱粒和绞碎工作(这一过程自然发生在野生谷物中)。在几代人的时间里,人与作物之间的浮士德式契约就会被封死。但在这里,证据又与这些期望完全相悖。
In fact, the latest research shows that the process of plant domestication in the Fertile Crescent was not fully completed until much later: as much as 3,000 years after the cultivation of wild cereals first began.34 (Once again, to get a sense of the scale here, think: the time between the putative Trojan War and today.) And while some modern historians may allow themselves the luxury of disposing with ‘a few short millennia’ here or there, we can hardly extend this attitude to the prehistoric actors whose lives we are trying to understand. At this point, you might reasonably ask what we mean by ‘cultivation’, and how we can possibly know when it began, if it didn’t lead to clear changes in the reproductive behaviour of wild plants? The answers lie in weeds (and in research methods dreamed up in an inventive sub-branch of archaeology, known as ‘archaeobotany’).
事实上,最新的研究表明,新月沃土的植物驯化过程直到很晚才完全完成:在首次开始种植野生谷物后的 3000 年。34(再一次,为了了解这里的规模,可以想想:从假定的特洛伊战争到今天的时间。)虽然一些现代历史学家可能允许自己在这里或那里奢侈地处理 “短短的几千年”,但我们很难将这种态度延伸到我们试图了解其生活的史前行动者。在这一点上,你可能会合理地问,我们所说的 “栽培” 是什么意思,如果它没有导致野生植物繁殖行为的明显变化,我们怎么可能知道它是什么时候开始的?答案在于杂草(以及考古学的一个创造性分支 —— “考古植物学” —— 所梦想的研究方法)。
Since the early 2000s, archaeobotanists have been studying a phenomenon known as ‘pre-domestication cultivation’. Cultivation in general refers to the work done by humans to improve the life chances of favoured crops, whether these be wild or domestic. This usually involves, at minimum, clearing and tilling the soil. Soil preparation induces changes in the size and shape of wild cereal grains, though such changes need not lead to domestication (basically they just get bigger). It also attracts other flora that flourish in disturbed soils, including arable weeds such as clover, fenugreek, gromwell and indeed members of the colourful crowfoot family (genus Adonis! ), quick to flower and just as quick to die.
自 21 世纪初以来,考古植物学家一直在研究一种被称为 “驯化前栽培” 的现象。栽培在,一般是指人类为改善所喜爱的作物的生活机会所做的工作,无论这些作物是野生还是家养的。这通常至少包括开垦和翻耕土壤。土壤整理会使野生谷物的大小和形状发生变化,尽管这种变化不一定导致驯化(基本上它们只是变得更大)。它还吸引了其他在受干扰土壤中生长的植物群,包括耕地杂草,如三叶草、葫芦巴、龙葵,以及色彩斑斓的乌贼家族成员(Adonis属!),它们开花快,死亡也快。
Since the 1980s, researchers have accumulated statistical evidence from prehistoric sites in the Middle East, analysing this evidence for changes over time in grain size and proportions of arable weed flora. Samples now number in the many tens of thousands. What they show is that, in certain parts of the region such as northern Syria, the cultivation of wild cereals dates back at least to 10,000 BC .35 Yet in these same regions, the biological process of crop domestication (including the crucial switch-over from brittle rachis to tough) was not completed until closer to 7000 BC – that is roughly ten times as long as it need have taken – if, that is, humans really had stumbled blindly into the whole process, following the trajectory dictated by changes in their crops.36 To be clear: that’s 3,000 years of human history, far too long to constitute an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ or even to be considered some kind of transitional state on the road to farming.
自 20 世纪 80 年代以来,研究人员积累了来自中东史前遗址的统计证据,分析了这些证据在谷物大小和耕地杂草植物群比例方面随时间的变化。现在的样本数量已达数万。它们显示,在该地区的某些地方,如叙利亚北部,野生谷物的种植至少可以追溯到公元前 10000 年。35然而,在这些地区,作物驯化的生物过程(包括从脆性轴到韧性的关键转换)直到接近公元前 7000 年才完成 —— 这大约是它所需时间的 10 倍 —— 如果,人类真的盲目地进入整个过程,遵循作物变化所决定的轨迹。36说白了:这就是 3000 年的人类历史,对于构成 “农业革命” 或甚至被认为是耕作道路上的某种过渡状态来说,时间太长。
To us, with our Platonic prejudices, all this looks like a very long and unnecessary delay, but clearly it was not experienced that way by people in Neolithic times. We need to understand this 3,000-year period as an important phase of human history in its own right. It’s a phase marked by foragers moving in and out of cultivation – and as we’ve seen, there’s nothing unusual or anomalous about this flirting and tinkering with the possibilities of farming, in just the ways Plato would have despised – but in no way enslaving themselves to the needs of their crops or herds. So long as it didn’t become too onerous, cultivation was just one of many ways in which early settled communities managed their environments. Separating wild and domestic plant populations need not have been a major concern for them, even if it appears that way to us.37
对我们来说,带着柏拉图式的偏见,这一切看起来是非常漫长和不必要的拖延,但显然新石器时代的人们并没有这样的经历。我们需要把这三千年的时期理解为人类历史上的一个重要阶段。这是一个以觅食者进出耕种为标志的阶段 —— 正如我们所看到的,这种以柏拉图会鄙视的方式对耕种的可能性进行的调戏和修补并没有什么不寻常或反常的地方 —— 但绝不是将自己奴役于作物或畜群的需要。只要不是太繁重,种植只是早期定居社区管理其环境的众多方式之一。对他们来说,分离野生和家养植物种群并不是一个主要的问题,即使在我们看来是这样。37
On reflection, this approach makes perfectly good sense. Cultivating domestic cereals, as the ‘affluent’ foragers of the Pacific Coast knew well, is enormously hard work.38 Serious farming meant serious soil maintenance and weed clearance. It meant threshing and winnowing after harvest. All these activities would have got in the way of hunting, wild food collection, craft production, marriages and any number of other things, not to mention storytelling, gambling, travelling and organizing masquerades. Indeed, to balance out their dietary needs and labour costs, early cultivators may even have strategically chosen practices that worked against the morphological changes which signal the onset of domestication in plants.39
仔细想想,这种做法是完全有道理的。正如太平洋沿岸的 “富裕的” 觅食者所熟知的那样,耕种家用谷物是非常辛苦的工作。38严肃的耕作意味着严肃的土壤维护和杂草清理。这意味着收获后要进行脱粒和绞碎。所有这些活动都会妨碍打猎、收集野生食物、制作工艺品、结婚和其他任何事情,更不用说讲故事、赌博、旅行和组织化妆舞会了。事实上,为了平衡他们的饮食需求和劳动成本,早期的耕种者甚至可能战略性地选择了与植物驯化开始时的形态变化相反的做法。39
This balancing act involved a special kind of cultivation, which brings us back full circle to Çatalhöyük and its wetland location. Called ‘flood retreat’, ‘flood recession’ or décrue farming, it takes place on the margins of seasonally flooding lakes or rivers. Flood-retreat farming is a distinctly lackadaisical way to raise crops. The work of soil preparation is given over mostly to nature. Seasonal flooding does the work of tillage, annually sifting and refreshing the soil. As the waters recede they leave behind a fertile bed of alluvial earth, where seed can be broadcast. This was garden cultivation on a small scale with no need for deforestation, weeding or irrigation, except perhaps the construction of small stone or earthen barriers (‘bunds’) to nudge the distribution of water this way or that. Areas of high groundwater, such as the edges of artesian springs, could also be exploited in this way.40
这种平衡行为涉及一种特殊的耕作方式,这使我们回到恰塔霍裕克和它的湿地位置。这种耕作被称为 “退洪”、“退洪” 或 “退耕”,发生在季节性泛滥的湖泊或河流的边缘。洪水退却耕作是一种明显缺乏耐心的农作物种植方式。整理土壤的工作主要交给了大自然。季节性的洪水做着耕作的工作,每年对土壤进行筛选和更新。当水退去时,它们留下了肥沃的冲积土床,可以在那里播种。这是小规模的花园式种植,不需要砍伐森林、除草或灌溉,也许只需要建造小型的石头或土质障碍物(“堤坝”),使水的分布向这边或那边倾斜。高地下水的地区,如自流泉的边缘,也可以用这种方式开发。40
In terms of labour, flood-retreat farming is not only pretty light, it also requires little central management. Critically, such systems have a kind of inbuilt resistance to the enclosure and measurement of land. Any given parcel of territory might be fertile one year, and then either flooded or dried out the next, so there is little incentive for long-term ownership or enclosure of fixed plots. It makes little sense to set up boundary stones when the ground itself is shifting underneath you. No form of human ecology is ‘innately’ egalitarian, but much as Rousseau and his epigones would have been surprised to hear it, these early cultivation systems did not lend themselves to the development of private property. If anything, flood-retreat farming was practically oriented towards the collective holding of land, or at least flexible systems of field reallocation.41
就劳动力而言,退水耕作不仅相当轻便,而且也不需要什么中央管理。最重要的是,这种系统对圈地和测量土地有一种内在的阻力。任何一块土地都可能在某一年是肥沃的,然后在下一年被水淹没或干涸,所以没有什么动力去长期拥有或圈定固定的地块。当土地本身在你脚下移动时,设立界石是没有意义的。没有哪种形式的人类生态是 “天生的” 平等主义,但正如卢梭和他的后裔们听到的那样,这些早期的耕作系统并不适合私有财产的发展。如果有的话,退水耕作实际上是以集体持有土地为导向的,或者至少是灵活的田地再分配制度。41
Flood-retreat farming was an especially important feature of Early Neolithic economies in the more arid, lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent, and particularly the Levantine Corridor, where important sites often developed on the margins of springs or lakes (e.g. Jericho, Tell Aswad) or on riverbanks (e.g. Abu Hureyra, Jerf el-Ahmar). Because the densest stands of wild grain crops actually lay in upland areas with higher rainfall, the inhabitants of such lowland sites had opportunities to isolate cultivated from wild stock, setting in motion a process of divergence and domestication by gathering grains from the highlands and broadcasting them in lowland, flood-retreat areas. This makes the extremely long timescale of cereal domestication more striking still. Early cultivators, it seems, were doing the minimum amount of subsistence work needed to stay in their given locations, which they occupied for reasons other than farming: hunting, foraging, fishing, trading and more.
在新月沃土较干旱的低地地区,特别是在黎凡特走廊,退洪农业是早期新石器时代经济的一个特别重要的特征,那里的重要遗址往往在泉水或湖泊的边缘(如杰里科,Tell Aswad)或河岸(如 Abu Hureyra, Jerf el-Ahmar)发展。由于野生粮食作物最密集的地方实际上是在降雨量较高的高地,这些低地的居民有机会将栽培的粮食和野生的粮食隔离开来,通过从高地采集粮食并在低地、洪水退去的地区播种,启动了一个分化和驯化的过程。这使得谷物驯化的极长的时间尺度更加引人注目。早期的耕种者,似乎是在做维持生计所需的最低限度的工作,他们占据这些地方的原因并不是为了耕种:打猎、觅食、捕鱼、贸易等等。
Rejecting a Garden of Eden-type narrative for the origins of farming also means rejecting, or at least questioning, the gendered assumptions lurking behind that narrative.42 Apart from being a story about the loss of primordial innocence, the Book of Genesis is also one of history’s most enduring charters for the hatred of women, rivalled only (in the Western tradition) by the prejudices of Greek authors like Hesiod, or for that matter Plato. It is Eve, after all, who proves too weak to resist the exhortations of the crafty serpent and is first to bite the forbidden fruit, because she is the one who desires knowledge and wisdom. Her punishment (and that of all women following her) is to bear children in severe pain and live under the rule of her husband, whose own destiny is to subsist by the sweat of his brow.
拒绝伊甸园式的农耕起源叙事也意味着拒绝或至少质疑潜伏在该叙事背后的性别假设。42创世纪》除了是一个关于失去原始纯真的故事外,也是历史上最持久的仇恨妇女的宪章之一,(在西方传统中)只有希腊作家如赫西奥德或柏拉图的偏见可以与之匹敌。毕竟,是夏娃证明了她太软弱,无法抵抗狡猾的蛇的劝告,并首先咬了禁果,因为她是渴望知识和智慧的人。她的惩罚(以及所有跟随她的妇女的惩罚)是在严重的痛苦中生孩子,并生活在她丈夫的统治之下,而她丈夫自己的命运是靠汗水来维持生计。
When today’s writers speculate about ‘wheat domesticating humans’ (as opposed to ‘humans domesticating wheat’), what they are really doing is replacing a question about concrete scientific (human) achievements with something rather more mystical. In this view, we’re not asking questions about who might actually have been doing all the intellectual and practical work of manipulating wild plants: exploring their properties in different soils and water regimes; experimenting with harvesting techniques, accumulating observations about the effects these all have on growth, reproduction and nutrition; debating the social implications. Instead, we find ourselves waxing lyrical about the temptations of forbidden fruits and musing on the unforeseen consequences of adopting a technology (agriculture) that Jared Diamond has characterized – again, with biblical overtones – as ‘the worst mistake in the history of the human race’.43
当今天的作家推测 “小麦驯化人类”(而不是 “人类驯化小麦”)时,他们所做的实际上是用更神秘的东西取代了关于具体科学(人类)成就的问题。在这种观点中,我们不是在问究竟是谁在做操纵野生植物的所有智力和实践工作:探索它们在不同土壤和水环境中的特性;实验收获技术,积累关于这些对生长、繁殖和营养的影响的观察结果;辩论其社会影响。相反,我们发现自己在抒发禁果的诱惑,思考采用一种技术(农业)所带来的不可预见的后果,贾里德·戴蒙德(Jared Diamond)再次以圣经的口吻将其描述为 “人类历史上最严重的错误”。43
Consciously or not, it is the contributions of women that get written out of such accounts. Harvesting wild plants and turning them into food, medicine and complex structures like baskets or clothing is almost everywhere a female activity, and may be gendered female even when practised by men. This is not quite an anthropological universal, but it’s about as close to one as you are ever likely to get.44 Hypothetically, of course, it is possible that things haven’t always been so. It’s even conceivable that the current situation is really the result of some great global switch-around of gender roles and language structures that took place in the last few thousand years – but one would imagine that such an epochal change would have left other traces, and no one has so much as suggested what such traces might be. True, archaeological evidence of any kind is hard to come by, because aside from charred seeds, very little of what was done culturally with plants survives from prehistoric times. But where evidence exists, it points to strong associations between women and plant-based knowledge as far back as one can trace such things.45
无论是否有意识地,妇女的贡献都会被写进这些叙述中。收获野生植物并将其变成食物、药品和复杂的结构,如篮子或衣服,几乎在任何地方都是女性的活动,即使是由男性从事的活动,也可能是女性的性别。这不完全是人类学的普遍现象,但它是你有可能得到的最接近的一种现象。44当然,从假设的角度来看,事情有可能并非一直如此。甚至可以想象,目前的情况确实是在过去几千年里发生的性别角色和语言结构的某种伟大的全球转换的结果 —— 但我们可以想象,这样一个时代的变化会留下其他的痕迹,而没有人提出这样的痕迹可能是什么。诚然,任何种类的考古证据都很难得到,因为除了烧焦的种子,史前时代在文化上对植物所做的事情几乎没有遗留。但是,在有证据的地方,它指出了妇女和基于植物的知识之间的密切联系,因为人们可以追溯到这种事情。45
By plant-based knowledge we don’t just mean new ways of working with wild flora to produce food, spices, medicines, pigments or poisons. We also mean the development of fibre-based crafts and industries, and the more abstract forms of knowledge these tend to generate about properties of time, space and structure. Textiles, basketry, network, matting and cordage were most likely always developed in parallel with the cultivation of edible plants, which also implies the development of mathematical and geometrical knowledge that is (quite literally) intertwined with the practice of these crafts.46 Women’s association with such knowledge extends back to some of the earliest surviving depictions of the human form: the ubiquitous sculpted female figurines of the last Ice Age with their woven headgear, string skirts and belts made of cord.47
我们所说的以植物为基础的知识并不仅仅是指利用野生植物生产食物、香料、药物、颜料或毒药的新方法。我们还指以纤维为基础的手工艺和工业的发展,以及这些往往产生的关于时间、空间和结构特性的更抽象的知识形式。纺织品、篮子、网络、垫子和绳索很可能总是与可食用植物的种植同步发展,这也意味着数学和几何知识的发展,这些知识与这些手工艺的实践交织在一起(相当地)。46妇女与这些知识的联系可以追溯到一些现存的最早的人类形态的描述:最后一个冰河时代无处不在的女性雕塑,她们有编织的头饰、线裙和用绳索制成的腰带。47
There is a peculiar tendency among (male) scholars to skip over the gendered aspects of this kind of knowledge or veil it in abstractions. Consider Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous comments on the ‘savage mind’, those ‘Neolithic scientists’ he imagined as having created a parallel route of discovery to modern science, but one that started from concrete interactions with the natural world rather than generalizing laws and theorems. The former method of experimentation proceeds ‘from the angle of sensible qualities’, and according to Lévi-Strauss it flowered in the Neolithic period, giving us the basis of agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, weaving, conservation and preparation of food, etc.; while the latter mode of discovery, starting from the definition of formal properties and theories, only came to fruition much more recently, with the advent of modern scientific procedures.48
在(男性)学者中,有一种特殊的倾向,即跳过这种知识的性别方面,或以抽象的方式掩盖它。考虑到 Claude Lévi-Strauss 关于 “野蛮人思想” 的著名评论,他想象那些 “新石器时代的科学家” 创造了一条与现代科学平行的发现之路,但这条路是从与自然世界的具体互动开始的,而不是概括性的规律和定理。前一种实验方法是 “从感性品质的角度” 进行的,根据列维·斯特劳斯的说法,它在新石器时代开花结果,为我们提供了农业、畜牧业、陶器、编织、保存和准备食物等的基础;而后一种发现模式,从形式属性和理论的定义出发,只是在最近,随着现代科学程序的出现才有了成果。48
Nowhere in The Savage Mind – a book ostensibly dedicated to understanding that other sort of knowledge, the Neolithic ‘science of the concrete’ – does Lévi-Strauss even mention the possibility that those responsible for its ‘flowering’ might, very often, have been women.
在《野蛮人的心灵》 —— 这本书表面上致力于理解另一种知识,即新石器时代的 “具体科学” —— 中,列维·斯特劳斯甚至没有提到负责其 “开花” 的人可能经常是妇女的可能性。
If we take these kinds of considerations (instead of some imaginary State of Nature) as our starting point, then entirely different sorts of questions arise about the invention of Neolithic farming. In fact, a whole new language becomes necessary to describe it, since part of the problem with conventional approaches lies in the very terms ‘agriculture’ and ‘domestication’. Agriculture is essentially about the production of food, which was just one (quite limited) aspect of the Neolithic relationship between people and plants. Domestication usually implies some form of domination or control over the unruly forces of ‘wild nature’. Feminist critiques have already done much to unpack the gendered assumptions behind both concepts, neither of which seems appropriate to describe the ecology of early cultivators.49
如果我们把这些考虑(而不是一些想象中的自然状态)作为我们的出发点,那么关于新石器时代农业的发明就会出现完全不同的问题。事实上,有必要用一种全新的语言来描述它,因为传统方法的部分问题在于 “农业” 和 “驯化” 这两个术语本身。农业本质上是关于食物的生产,这只是新石器时代人与植物之间关系的一个方面(相当有限)。驯化通常意味着对 “野生自然” 的不规则力量的某种形式的支配或控制。女权主义的批评已经做了很多工作来解读这两个概念背后的性别化假设,这两个概念似乎都不适合描述早期耕种者的生态学。49
What if we shifted the emphasis away from agriculture and domestication to, say, botany or even gardening? At once we find ourselves closer to the realities of Neolithic ecology, which seem little concerned with taming wild nature or squeezing as many calories as possible from a handful of seed grasses. What it really seems to have been about is creating garden plots – artificial, often temporary habitats – in which the ecological scales were tipped in favour of preferred species. Those species included plants that modern botanists separate out into competing classes of ‘weeds’, ‘drugs’, ‘herbs’ and ‘food crops’, but which Neolithic botanists (schooled by hands-on experience, not textbooks) preferred to grow side by side.
如果我们把重点从农业和驯化转移到植物学甚至园艺上,会怎么样?我们立刻发现自己更接近新石器时代生态学的现实,它似乎并不关心驯服野生自然或从一小撮草籽中榨取尽可能多的热量。 它真正关心的似乎是创建花园地块 —— 人工的、通常是临时的栖息地 —— 其中的生态天平向首选物种倾斜。这些物种包括现代植物学家将其分为 “杂草”、“药物”、“草药” 和 “粮食作物” 等竞争类别的植物,但新石器时代的植物学家(通过实践经验而不是教科书学习)更喜欢将这些植物并排种植。
Instead of fixed fields, they exploited alluvial soils on the margins of lakes and springs, which shifted location from year to year. Instead of hewing wood, tilling fields and carrying water, they found ways of ‘persuading’ nature to do much of this labour for them. Theirs was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase the likelihood of securing a favourable outcome.50 Their ‘laboratory’ was the real world of plants and animals, whose innate tendencies they exploited through close observation and experimentation. This Neolithic mode of cultivation was, moreover, highly successful.
他们没有固定的田地,而是利用湖泊和泉水边缘的冲积土,这些地方每年都会有变化。他们不再砍伐木材、耕地和运水,而是找到了 “说服” 大自然为他们做这些劳动的方法。他们的科学不是支配和分类,而是弯曲和哄骗,培育和劝说,甚至欺骗自然的力量,以增加获得有利结果的可能性。50他们的 “实验室” 是真实的植物和动物世界,他们通过仔细观察和实验来利用这些植物和动物的先天倾向。此外,这种新石器时代的耕作模式是非常成功的。
In lowland regions of the Fertile Crescent, such as the Jordan and Euphrates valleys, ecological systems of this kind fostered the incremental growth of settlements and populations for three millennia. Pretending it was all just some kind of very extended transition or rehearsal for the advent of ‘serious’ agriculture is to miss the real point. It’s also to ignore what to many has long seemed an obvious connection between Neolithic ecology and the visibility of women in contemporary art and ritual. Whether one calls these figures ‘goddesses’ or ‘scientists’ is perhaps less important than recognizing how their very appearance signals a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.
在新月沃土的低地地区,如约旦河和幼发拉底河流域,这种生态系统促进了三千年来定居点和人口的逐步增长。假装这一切只是某种非常漫长的过渡或为 “严肃的” 农业的出现而进行的预演,是忽略了真正的问题。这也是忽略了对许多人来说,新石器时代的生态和妇女在当代艺术和仪式中的能见度之间长期以来似乎存在的明显联系。无论人们把这些人物称为 “女神” 还是 “科学家”,也许都不如认识到她们的出现是如何预示着对妇女地位的新认识,这肯定是基于她们在将这些新的社会形式结合在一起的具体成就。
Part of the difficulty with studying scientific innovation in prehistory is that we have to imagine a world without laboratories; or rather, a world in which laboratories are potentially everywhere and anywhere. Here Lévi-Strauss is much more on the ball:
研究史前科学创新的部分困难在于,我们必须想象一个没有实验室的世界;或者说,一个实验室有可能无处不在、无处不有的世界。在这一点上,列维·斯特劳斯做得更到位。
… there are two distinct modes of scientific thought. These are certainly not a function of different stages of development of the human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination: the other at a remove from it. It is as if the necessary connections which are the object of all science, Neolithic or modern, could be arrived at by two different routes, one very close to, and the other more remote from, sensible intuition.51
…… 有两种不同的科学思想模式。这当然不是人类心灵的不同发展阶段的功能,而是自然界可供科学探究的两个战略层面:一个与感知和想象力的层面大致相适应:另一个与之相距甚远。就好像作为所有科学对象的必要联系,无论是新石器时代还是现代科学,都可以通过两种不同的途径来实现,一种非常接近感性的直觉,另一种则与之相距较远。51
Lévi-Strauss, as we noted, called the first route to discovery a ‘science of the concrete’. And it’s important to recall that most of humanity’s greatest scientific discoveries – the invention of farming, pottery, weaving, metallurgy, systems of maritime navigation, monumental architecture, the classification and indeed domestication of plants and animals, and so on – were made under precisely those other (Neolithic) sorts of conditions. Judged by its results, then, this concrete approach was undeniably science. But what does ‘science of the concrete’ actually look like, in the archaeological record? How can we hope to see it at work, when so many thousands of years stand between us and the processes of innovation we are trying to understand? The answer here lies precisely in its ‘concreteness’. Invention in one domain finds echoes and analogies across a whole range of others, which might otherwise seem completely unrelated.
正如我们所指出的,列维·斯特劳斯将第一条发现之路称为 “具体的科学”。重要的是要记住,人类最伟大的科学发现 —— 农耕、陶器、编织、冶金、航海系统、纪念碑式建筑、植物和动物的分类和驯化等等的发明,正是在这些其他(新石器时代)的条件下完成的。那么,从其结果来看,这种具体的方法不可否认是科学。但是,在考古记录中,“具体的科学” 到底是什么样子的?当我们与我们试图理解的创新过程之间隔着几千年的时间时,我们怎么能希望看到它在工作?这里的答案正是在于它的 “具体性”。一个领域的发明可以在一系列其他领域中找到呼应和类比,否则这些领域可能看起来完全不相关。
We can see this clearly in Early Neolithic cereal cultivation. Recall that flood-retreat farming required people to establish durable settlements in mud-based environments, like swamps and lake margins. Doing so meant becoming intimate with the properties of soils and clays, carefully observing their fertility under different conditions, but also experimenting with them as tectonic materials, or even as vehicles of abstract thought. As well as supporting new forms of cultivation, soil and clay – mixed with wheat and chaff – became basic materials of construction: essential in building the first permanent houses; used to make ovens, furniture and insulation – almost everything, in fact, except pottery, a later invention in this part of the world.
我们可以在新石器时代早期的谷物种植中清楚地看到这一点。回顾一下,洪水退去后的农业要求人们在以泥土为基础的环境中建立持久的定居点,如沼泽和湖边。这样做意味着要亲近土壤和粘土的特性,仔细观察它们在不同条件下的肥力,而且还要把它们作为构造材料,甚至作为抽象思维的载体进行试验。除了支持新的耕作形式外,土壤和粘土 —— 与小麦和谷壳混合 —— 成为基本的建筑材料:在建造第一批永久性房屋时必不可少;用于制造烤箱、家具和绝缘材料 —— 事实上,除了陶器,几乎所有东西都是后来在世界这个地区发明的。
But clay was also used, in the same times and places, to (literally) model relationships of utterly different kinds, between men and women, people and animals. People started using its plastic qualities to figure out mental problems, making small geometric tokens that many see as direct precursors to later systems of mathematical notation. Archaeologists find these tiny numerical devices in direct association with figurines of herd animals and full-bodied women: the kind of miniatures that stimulate so much modern speculation about Neolithic spirituality, and which find later echoes in myths about the demiurgic, life-giving properties of clay.52 As we’ll soon see, earth and clay even came to redefine relationships between the living and the dead.
但是,在同样的时间和地点,粘土也被用来模拟完全不同的关系,在男人和女人、人和动物之间。人们开始利用粘土的可塑性来解决心理问题,制作小的几何符号,许多人认为这是后来数学系统的直接先兆, 符号。考古学家发现,这些微小的数字装置与牲畜和成年妇女的塑像直接相关:这种微型模型激发了现代人对新石器时代精神的猜测,并在后来关于粘土的炼狱和生命属性的神话中找到了回声。52我们很快就会看到,土和粘土甚至重新定义了生者和死者之间的关系。
Seen this way, the ‘origins of farming’ start to look less like an economic transition and more like a media revolution, which was also a social revolution, encompassing everything from horticulture to architecture, mathematics to thermodynamics, and from religion to the remodelling of gender roles. And while we can’t know exactly who was doing what in this brave new world, it’s abundantly clear that women’s work and knowledge were central to its creation; that the whole process was a fairly leisurely, even playful one, not forced by any environmental catastrophe or demographic tipping point and unmarked by major violent conflict. What’s more, it was all carried out in ways that made radical inequality an extremely unlikely outcome.
这样看来,“农业的起源” 开始不像是经济转型,而更像是一场媒体革命,这也是一场社会革命,涵盖了从园艺到建筑、从数学到热力学、从宗教到性别角色重塑的一切。虽然我们不能确切地知道谁在这个勇敢的新世界里做了什么,但非常清楚的是,妇女的工作和知识是其创造的核心;整个过程是一个相当悠闲的,甚至是嬉戏的过程,没有被任何环境灾难或人口临界点所强迫,也没有重大的暴力冲突。更重要的是,这一切都以使激进的不平等成为极不可能的结果的方式进行的。
All this applies most clearly to the development of Early Neolithic societies in lowland parts of the Fertile Crescent, and especially along the valleys of the Jordan and Euphrates Rivers. But these communities did not develop in isolation. For almost the entire period we’ve been discussing, the upland crescent – following the foothills of the Taurus and Zagros Mountains and the adjoining steppe – was also home to settled populations, adept in managing a variety of wild plant and animal resources. They too were often village dwellers, who adopted strategies of cultivation and herding as they saw fit, while still deriving the bulk of their diet from non-domesticated species. But in other ways they are clearly marked out from their lowland neighbours, their construction of megalithic architecture, including the famous structures of Göbekli Tepe, being just the most obvious. Some of these groups lived in proximity to lowland Neolithic societies, especially along the upper reaches of the Euphrates, but their art and ritual suggest a radically different orientation to the world, as sharply distinguished from the latter as Northwest Coast foragers were from their Californian neighbours.
所有这些都最清楚地适用于新月沃土低地的新石器时代早期社会的发展,特别是沿约旦河和幼发拉底河的山谷。但这些社区并不是孤立地发展的。几乎在我们讨论的整个时期,新月高地 —— 沿着金牛座和扎格罗斯山的山麓以及毗邻的草原 —— 也是定居人口的家园,他们善于管理各种野生植物和动物资源。他们通常也是村落居民,在他们认为合适的情况下采取种植和放牧的策略,同时仍然从非驯化物种中获取大部分饮食。但在其他方面,他们与他们的低地邻居有明显的区别,他们建造的巨石建筑,包括著名的 Göbekli Tepe 建筑,就是最明显的例子。其中一些群体生活在低地新石器时代社会的附近,尤其是幼发拉底河上游一带,但他们的艺术和仪式表明他们对世界的取向完全不同,就像西北海岸的觅食者与加利福尼亚的邻居一样,与后者有着鲜明的区别。
At the frontier between the upland and lowland sectors of the Fertile Crescent stands Göbekli Tepe itself. It is actually one of a series of megalithic centres that sprang up around the Urfa valley, near the modern border of Syria and Turkey, in the ninth millennium BC .53 Most are still not excavated. Only the tops of their great T-shaped pillars can be seen projecting from the deep valley soils. While direct evidence is still lacking, this style of stone architecture probably marks the apex of a building tradition that began in timber. Wooden prototypes may also lie behind Göbekli Tepe’s tradition of sculptural art, which evokes a world of fearsome images, far removed from the visual arts of the lowlands, with their humble figurines of women and domestic animals, and hamlets of clay.
在新月沃土的高地和低地的交界处,矗立着戈拜克里特佩本身。它实际上是公元前九千年在现代叙利亚和土耳其边界附近的乌尔法河谷周围出现的一系列巨石中心之一。53大多数仍然没有被挖掘出来。只能看到他们巨大的 T 形石柱的顶端从深谷的土壤中伸出来。虽然仍然缺乏直接的证据,但这种石头建筑风格可能标志着始于木材的建筑传统的顶点。Göbekli Tepe 的雕塑艺术传统背后可能也有木质原型,它唤起了一个可怕的形象世界,与低地的视觉艺术相去甚远,低地的妇女和家畜雕像以及泥土小村都是简陋的。
In both medium and message, Göbekli Tepe could hardly be more different from the world of early farming communities. Its standing remains were wrought from stone, a material little used for construction in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys. Carved on these stone pillars is an imagery dominated by wild and venomous animals; scavengers and predators, almost exclusively sexed male. On a limestone pillar a lion rears up in high relief, teeth gnashing, claws outstretched, penis and scrotum on show. Elsewhere lurks a malevolent boar, its male sex also displayed. The most often repeated images depict raptors taking human heads. One remarkable sculpture, resembling a totem pole, comprises superimposed pairings of victims and predators: disembodied skulls and sharp-eyed birds of prey. Elsewhere, flesh-eating birds and other carnivores are shown grasping, tossing about or otherwise playing with their catch of human crania; carved below one such figure on a monumental pillar is the image of a headless man with an erect penis (conceivably this depicts the kind of immediate post-mortem erection or ‘priapism’ that occurs in victims of hanging or beheading as a result of massive trauma to the spinal cord).54
在媒介和信息方面,Göbekli Tepe 与早期农业社区的世界没有什么不同。它的遗迹是由石头锻造而成的,这种材料在幼发拉底河和约旦河谷很少用于建筑。在这些石柱上雕刻的是以野生和有毒动物为主的图像;食腐动物和掠食者,几乎都是雄性。在一根石灰石柱子上,一头狮子高高耸立,咬牙切齿,伸出爪子,阴茎和阴囊都露了出来。在其他地方潜伏着一只邪恶的野猪,它的雄性也被展示出来。最经常重复的画面是描绘猛禽取人头。有一个引人注目的雕塑,类似于图腾柱,由受害者和捕食者的叠加组合组成:没有实体的头骨和目光锐利的捕食者。在其他地方,食肉鸟和其他食肉动物被显示为抓取、抛掷或以其他方式玩弄它们捕获的人类头颅;在一个不朽的柱子上,一个这样的人物下面刻着一个无头的人,他的阴茎勃起(可以想象,这描绘了那种死后立即勃起或 “priapism”,在绞刑或斩首的受害者身上发生,因为脊髓受到巨大创伤的结果)。54
What are these images telling us? Could the taking of trophy heads among upland populations of the steppe-forest zone be part of the picture? At the settlement of Nevalı Çori – also in Urfa province, and with similar monuments to Göbekli Tepe – burials with detached skulls were found, including one of a young woman with a flint dagger still lodged under her jaw; while from Jerf el-Ahmar – on the Upper Euphrates, where the lowland crescent approaches the uplands – comes the startling find of a splayed skeleton (again, a young woman) still lying inside a burnt-down building, prone and missing her head.55 At Göbekli Tepe itself, the chopping of human heads was mimicked in statuary: anthropomorphic sculptures were made, only to have their tops smashed off and the stone heads buried adjacent to pillars within the shrines.56 For all this, archaeologists remain rightly cautious about linking such practices to conflict or predation; so far, there is only limited evidence for interpersonal violence, let alone warfare at this time.57
这些图像告诉我们什么?在草原·森林地带的高地人口中,取用战利品的头颅会不会是的一部分?在 Nevalı Çori 定居点 —— 也是在乌尔法省,有与 Göbekli Tepe 类似的纪念碑 —— 发现了带有分离的头骨的墓葬,包括一个年轻妇女,她的下巴下还插着一把燧石匕首;而在 Jerf el-Ahmar —— 幼发拉底河上游,低地新月形地区接近高地的地方,发现了一个惊人的发现,一具被打翻的骨架(还是一个年轻妇女)仍然躺在一栋被烧毁的建筑物里,俯卧着,没有头。55在 Göbekli Tepe 本身,砍人头的行为被模仿成了雕像:拟人化的雕塑被制作出来,只是它们的顶部被砸掉了,石头被埋在神龛的柱子旁边。56对于这一切,考古学家对于将这种做法与冲突或掠夺联系起来仍然保持着正确的谨慎态度;到目前为止,只有有限的证据表明人际间的暴力,更不用说此时的战争了。57
Here we might also consider evidence from Çayönü Tepesi, in the Ergani plain. This was the site of a large prehistoric settlement comprising substantial houses built on stone foundations, as well as public buildings. It lay on a tributary of the Tigris in the hill country of Diyarbakır, not far north of Göbekli Tepe, and was established around the same time by a community of hunter-foragers and sometime herders.58 Near the centre of the settlement stood a long-lived structure that archaeologists call the ‘House of Skulls’, for the simple reason that it was found to hold the remains of over 450 people, including headless corpses and over ninety crania, all crammed into small compartments. Cervical vertebrae were attached to some skulls, indicating they were severed from fleshed (but not necessarily living) bodies. Most of the heads were taken from young adults or adolescents, individuals in the prime of life, and ten from children. If any of these were trophy skulls, claimed from victims or enemies, then they were chosen for their vitality. The skulls were left bare, with no trace of decoration.59
在这里,我们也可以考虑来自埃尔干尼平原的恰尤努·特佩西的证据。这是一个大型史前定居点的所在地,包括建在石基上的大量房屋以及公共建筑。它位于迪亚巴克尔山地的底格里斯河支流上,在戈贝利特佩北部不远处,大约在同一时期由狩猎者和牧民组成的社区建立。58在定居点的中心附近有一个长期存在的建筑,考古学家称之为 “头骨之家”,原因很简单,它被发现容纳了超过 450 人的遗体,包括无头尸体和超过 90 个头骨,都挤在小隔间里。一些头骨上附有颈椎骨,表明它们是从有肉的(但不一定是活的)身体上割下来的。大多数头颅取自青壮年或青少年,正值壮年的人,还有 10 个取自儿童。如果这些是战利品的头骨,是从受害者或敌人身上取得的,那么它们被选中是因为它们有活力。这些头骨都是裸露的,没有任何装饰的痕迹。59
Human remains in the House of Skulls were stored together with those of large prey animals, and a wild cattle skull was mounted on an outside wall. In its later stages of use, the building was furnished with a polished stone table, erected near the entrance in an open plaza that could have hosted large gatherings. Studies of blood residues from the surface, and from associated objects, led researchers to identify this as an altar on which public sacrifice and processing of bodies took place, the victims both animal and human. Whether or not the detail of this reconstruction is correct, the association of vanquished animals and human remains is suggestive. The House of Skulls met its end in a violent conflagration, after which the people of Çayönü covered the whole complex under a deep blanket of pebbles and soil.
骷髅屋中的人类遗骸与大型猎物的遗骸存放在一起,一个野牛头骨被安装在外面的墙上。在使用的后期阶段,该建筑配备了一张磨光的石桌,竖立在靠近入口的一个开放广场上,可以举办大型聚会。对表面的血液残留物和相关物品的研究,使研究人员确定这是一个祭坛,在这里进行公共祭祀和处理尸体,受害者包括动物和人类。无论这种重建的细节是否正确,被征服的动物和人类遗骸的关联是有提示性的。骷髅屋在一场激烈的大火中灭亡,之后恰尤努人将整个建筑群覆盖在一块深深的卵石和土壤之下。
Perhaps what we’re detecting in the House of Skulls, but in a rather different form, is a complex of ideas already familiar from Amazonia and elsewhere: hunting as predation, shifting subtly from a mode of subsistence to a way of modelling and enacting dominance over other human beings. After all, even feudal lords in Europe tended to identify themselves with lions, hawks and predatory beasts (they were also fond of the symbolism of putting heads on poles; ‘off with his head!’ is still the most popular phrase identified with the British monarchy).60 But what about Göbekli Tepe itself? If the display of trophy heads really was an important aspect of the site’s function, surely some direct trace would remain, other than just some suggestive stone carvings.
也许我们在 “骷髅屋” 中发现的,只是以一种相当不同的形式,是亚马逊和其他地方已经熟悉的思想的综合体:狩猎作为捕食,从一种生存模式巧妙地转变为一种塑造和制定对其他人类的统治的方式。毕竟,即使是欧洲的封建领主也倾向于将自己与狮子、鹰和掠夺性野兽联系起来(他们也喜欢把头放在柱子上的象征意义;“砍掉他的头!” 仍然是英国君主制最流行的说法)。60但是 Göbekli Tepe 本身呢?如果战利品头颅的展示真的是该遗址功能的一个重要方面,那么除了一些暗示性的石刻外,肯定还会有一些直接的痕迹。
Human remains are so far rare at Göbekli Tepe. Which makes it even more remarkable that – of the few hundred scraps of prehistoric human bone so far recovered from the site – some two-thirds are indeed segments of skulls or facial bones, some retaining signs of de-fleshing, and even decapitation. Among them were found remnants of three skulls, recovered from the area of the stone shrines, which bear evidence for more elaborate types of cultural modification in the form of deep incisions and drill-holes, allowing the skull to dangle from a string or be mounted on a pole.61
到目前为止,人类遗骸在 Göbekli Tepe 是非常罕见的。这使得它更加引人注目 —— 在迄今为止从该遗址中发现的几百块史前人类骨骼碎片中,大约三分之二确实是头骨或面部骨骼的片段,有些还保留着去肉的痕迹,甚至是斩首的痕迹。在这些头骨中,有三个头骨的残余,是在石制神龛区域发现的,这些头骨有证据表明有更复杂的文化改造类型,其形式是深切口和钻孔,使头骨可以悬挂在绳子上或安装在柱子上。61
In earlier chapters, we’ve explored why farming was much less of a rupture in human affairs than we tend to assume. Now we’re finally in a position to bring the various strands of this chapter together and say something about why this matters. Let’s recap.
在前几章中,我们已经探讨了为什么农耕在人类事务中的断裂远没有我们倾向于假设的那么严重。现在,我们终于可以把这一章的各个部分结合起来,说一说为什么这很重要。让我们来回顾一下。
Neolithic farming began in Southwest Asia as a series of local specializations in crop-raising and animal-herding, scattered across various parts of the region, with no epicentre. These local strategies were pursued, it seems, in order to sustain access to trade partnerships and optimal locations for hunting and gathering, which continued unabated alongside cultivation. As we discussed back in Chapter One, this ‘trade’ might well have had more to do with sociability, romance or adventure than material advantage as we’d normally conceive it. Still, whatever the reasons, over thousands of years such local innovations – everything from non-shattering wheat to docile sheep – were exchanged between villages, producing a degree of uniformity among a coalition of societies across the Middle East. A standard ‘package’ of mixed farming emerged, from the Iranian Zagros to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and then spread beyond it, albeit, as we’ll see, with very mixed success.
新石器时代的农业开始于西南亚,是一系列散布在该地区不同地方的农作物种植和动物饲养的地方性专业,没有中心。这些地方战略似乎是为了维持贸易伙伴关系和最佳的狩猎和采集地点,而狩猎和采集与耕作同时进行,没有丝毫停顿。正如我们在第一章所讨论的那样,这种 “贸易” 很可能与社交、浪漫或冒险有关,而不是与我们通常所设想的物质利益有关。,不过,不管是什么原因,数千年来,这种地方创新 —— 从不碎的小麦到温顺的羊 —— 在村庄之间交换,在整个中东的社会联盟中产生了一定程度的统一性。一个标准的混合农业 “套餐” 出现了,从伊朗扎格罗斯到地中海东岸,然后再向外传播,尽管正如我们将看到的那样,成功率很低。
But from its earliest beginnings, farming was much more than a new economy. It also saw the creation of patterns of life and ritual that remain doggedly with us millennia later, and have since become fixtures of social existence among a broad sector of humanity: everything from harvest festivals to habits of sitting on benches, putting cheese on bread, entering and exiting via doorways, or looking at the world through windows. Originally, as we’ve seen, much of this Neolithic lifestyle developed alongside an alternative cultural pattern in the steppe and upland zones of the Fertile Crescent, most clearly distinguished by the building of grand monuments in stone, and by a symbolism of male virility and predation that largely excluded female concerns. By contrast, the art and ritual of lowland settlements in the Euphrates and Jordan valleys presents women as co-creators of a distinct form of society – learned through the productive routines of cultivation, herding and village life – and celebrated by modelling and binding soft materials, such as clay or fibres, into symbolic forms.62
但从最早的开始,农耕就不仅仅是一种新的经济。它还见证了生活和仪式模式的产生,这些模式在几千年后仍然与我们形影不离,并成为广大人类社会生存的固定模式:从收获节到坐在长椅上的习惯,把奶酪放在面包上,通过门洞进出,或通过窗户看世界。最初,正如我们所看到的,这种新石器时代的生活方式大部分是与新月沃土的草原和高原地区的另一种文化模式一起发展起来的,最明显的特征是用石头建造宏伟的纪念碑,以及男性阳刚之气和掠夺的象征主义,在很大程度上排除了女性的关注。相比之下,幼发拉底河和约旦河谷的低地定居点的艺术和仪式将妇女作为一种独特的社会形式的共同创造者 —— 通过耕种、放牧和村庄生活的生产程序来学习 —— 并通过将粘土或纤维等软材料塑造成象征性的形式来庆祝。62
Of course, we could put these cultural oppositions down to coincidence, or perhaps even environmental factors. But considering the close proximity of the two cultural patterns, and how the groups responsible for them exchanged goods and were keenly aware of each other’s existence, it is equally possible, and perhaps more plausible, to see what happened as the result of mutual and self-conscious differentiation, or schismogenesis, akin to what we traced in the last chapter among the recent foraging societies of America’s West Coast. The more that uplanders came to organize their artistic and ceremonial lives around the theme of predatory male violence, the more lowlanders tended to organize theirs around female knowledge and symbolism – and vice versa. With no written sources to guide us, the clearest evidence we can find for such mutual oppositions is when things get (quite literally, in our case) turned on their head, as when one group of people seems to make a great display of going against some highly characteristic behaviour of their neighbours.
当然,我们可以把这些文化的对立归结为巧合,甚至可能是环境因素。但是,考虑到这两种文化模式的密切关系,以及负责这两种文化模式的群体是如何进行商品交换和敏锐地意识到对方的存在的,我们同样有可能,而且也许更有道理,把所发生的事情看作是相互和自我意识的分化的结果,或者说是分裂的发生,类似于我们在上一章中追踪的美洲西海岸近期的觅食社会的情况。高地人越是围绕男性掠夺性暴力的主题来组织他们的艺术和仪式生活,低地人就越倾向于围绕女性知识和象征主义来组织他们的生活 —— 反之亦然。由于没有书面资料来指导我们,我们能找到的关于这种相互对立的最清楚的证据是,当事情被颠覆(在我们的例子中,是真的被颠覆)的时候,比如当,一群人似乎大张旗鼓地反对他们邻居的一些高度特征的行为。
Such evidence is not at all hard to find, since lowland villagers, like their upland neighbours, also attached great ritual significance to human heads, but chose to treat them in ways that would have been utterly foreign to the uplanders. Let us briefly illustrate what we mean.
这样的证据一点也不难找到,因为低地村民和他们的高地邻居一样,也非常重视人头的仪式感,但他们选择的处理方式对高地人来说是完全陌生的。让我们简单地说明一下我们的意思。
Perhaps the most recognizable – and definitely the most macabre – objects found in Early Neolithic villages of the Levantine Corridor (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and the Syrian Euphrates) are ‘skull portraits’. These are heads that were removed from burials of women, men and occasionally children in a secondary process, after the corpse had decomposed. Once separated from the body, they were cleaned and carefully modelled over with clay, then coated with layers of plaster to become something altogether different. Shells were often fixed into the eye sockets, just as clay and plaster filled in for the flesh and skin. Red and white paint added further life. Skull portraits appear to have been treasured heirlooms, carefully stored and repaired over generations. They reached their height of popularity in the eighth millennium BC, as Göbekli Tepe fell into decline, when the practice spread as far as Çatalhöyük; there, one such modelled head was found in an intimate situation, clutched to the chest of a female burial.63
在黎凡特走廊(以色列、巴勒斯坦、约旦、黎巴嫩和叙利亚幼发拉底河)的新石器时代早期村庄发现的最容易辨认的 —— 也是最可怕的 —— 物品也许是 “头骨画像”。这些头颅是在尸体腐烂后,在第二道工序中从妇女、男子以及偶尔从儿童的墓葬中取出的。一旦与尸体分离,它们就被清洗干净,并用粘土仔细塑形,然后再涂上一层石膏,成为完全不同的东西。贝壳通常被固定在眼窝里,就像粘土和石膏填补了肉和皮肤一样。红色和白色的油漆进一步增加了生命力。骷髅头像似乎是珍贵的传家宝,几代人都小心翼翼地保存和修复着。它们在公元前八千年达到了流行的顶峰,因为戈贝利特佩逐渐衰落,当时这种做法一直传播到恰塔霍裕克;在那里,有一个这样的头像被发现在一个亲密的场合,紧紧地抱在一个女性的胸前。63
Ever since these intriguing objects first came to light at Jericho in the early twentieth century, archaeologists have puzzled over their meaning. Many scholars see them as expressions of care and reverence for ancestors. But there are literally countless ways one might show respect or grief for ancestors without systematically removing crania from their places of rest and modelling life into them by adding layers of clay, plaster, shell, fibre and pigment. Even in the lowland parts of the Fertile Crescent, this treatment was reserved for a minority of individuals. More often, human crania removed from burials were left bare, while others had complex histories as ritual objects, such as a group of skulls from Tell Qarassa in southern Syria, found to have been deliberately mutilated around the face in what appears to have been an act of post-mortem desecration.64
自从二十世纪初在杰里科首次发现这些耐人寻味的物品以来,考古学家们一直对它们的意义感到困惑。许多学者认为它们表达了对祖先的关怀和敬意。但是,人们可以用无数种方式来表达对祖先的尊重和哀悼,而不需要系统地将头骨从其安放的地方移走,并通过添加粘土、石膏、贝壳、纤维和颜料层来塑造其生命。即使在新月沃土的低地,这种处理方式也只保留给少数人。更常见的情况是,从墓葬中取出的人的头骨是裸露的,而其他的头骨则有复杂的历史,如叙利亚南部 Tell Qarassa 的一组头骨,发现其面部周围被故意残缺,这似乎是一种死后的亵渎行为。64
In the Jordan and Euphrates valleys and adjacent coastlands, the practice of curating human crania has an even longer history, extending back to Natufian hunter-gatherers, before the onset of the Neolithic period; but longevity need not imply an entirely local context for later ritual innovations, such as the addition of decorative materials to make skull portraits. Perhaps making skull portraits in this particular way was not just about reconnecting with the dead, but also negating the logic of stripping, cutting, piercing and accumulating heads as trophies. At the very least, it offers a further indication that lowland and upland populations in the Fertile Crescent were following quite different – and in some ways, mutually opposed – cultural trajectories throughout the centuries when plants and animals were first domesticated.65
在约旦和幼发拉底河流域以及邻近的海岸地区,策划人类头骨的做法甚至有更长的历史,可以追溯到 Natufian 狩猎采集者,在新石器时代开始之前;但悠久的历史并不一定意味着后来的仪式创新完全是在当地背景下进行的,例如添加装饰材料来制作头骨肖像。也许以这种特殊的方式制作头骨画像,不仅仅是为了与死者重新建立联系,也是为了否定剥离、切割、刺穿和积累头部作为战利品的逻辑。至少,这进一步表明,在植物和动物首次被驯化的几个世纪里,新月沃土的低地和高地人口遵循着相当不同的 —— 在某些方面是相互对立的 —— 文化轨迹。65
Back in the 1970s, a brilliant Cambridge archaeologist called David Clarke predicted that, with modern research, almost every aspect of the old edifice of human evolution, ‘the explanations of the development of modern man, domestication, metallurgy, urbanization and civilization – may in perspective emerge as semantic snares and metaphysical mirages.’66 It is beginning to seem like he was right.
早在 20 世纪 70 年代,一位杰出的剑桥大学考古学家大卫·克拉克(David Clarke)预言,随着现代研究的开展,人类进化的古老大厦的几乎每一个方面,“对现代人的发展、驯化、冶金、城市化和文明的解释 —— 可能会在视角上出现语义上的陷阱和形而上学的幻觉。66现在看来,他是对的。
Let’s recap a little further. A founding block in that old edifice of human social evolution was the allocation of a specific place in history to foraging societies, which was to be the prelude to an ‘Agricultural Revolution’ that supposedly changed everything about the course of history. The job of foragers in this conventional narrative is to be all that farming is not (and thus also to explain, by implication, what farming is). If farmers are sedentary, foragers must be mobile; if farmers actively produce food, foragers must merely collect it; if farmers have private property, foragers must renounce it; and if farming societies are unequal, this is by contrast with the ‘innate’ egalitarianism of foragers. Finally, if a particular group of foragers should happen to possess any such features in common with farmers, the dominant narrative demands that these can only be ‘incipient’, ‘emergent’ or ‘deviant’ in nature, so that the destiny of foragers is either to ‘evolve’ into farmers, or eventually to wither and die.
让我们再回顾一下。在人类社会进化的古老大厦中,有一块基石是为觅食社会分配了一个特定的历史位置,这将是 “农业革命” 的前奏,据说它改变了历史进程的一切。在这种传统的叙述中,觅食者的工作是成为农业所不具备的一切(因此也暗示着解释农业是什么)。如果农民是定居的,觅食者就必须是流动的;如果农民积极生产食物,觅食者就必须只是收集食物;如果农民有私有财产,觅食者就必须放弃它;如果农业社会是不平等的,这与觅食者的 “天生” 平等主义形成对比。最后,如果一个特定的觅食者群体碰巧拥有任何与农民共同的特征,主流叙事要求这些特征只能是 “初生”、“出现” 或 “偏离” 性质的,因此觅食者的命运要么是 “进化” 为农民,要么最终枯萎和死亡。
It will by now be increasingly obvious to any reader that almost nothing about this established narrative matches the available evidence. In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, long regarded as the cradle of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, there was in fact no ‘switch’ from Palaeolithic forager to Neolithic farmer. The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production took something in the order of 3,000 years. And while agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception. In the centuries between, people were effectively trying farming on for size, ‘play farming’ if you will, switching between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth.
现在,任何读者都会越来越清楚地看到,这种既定的叙述几乎,与现有的证据完全不符。在长期被视为 “农业革命” 摇篮的中东新月沃土上,事实上并没有出现从旧石器时代的觅食者到新石器时代的农民的 “转变”。从主要依靠野生资源生活到以粮食生产为基础的生活,需要 3000 年左右的时间。虽然农业允许财富更不平等的集中,但在大多数情况下,这只是在农业开始后的几千年才开始发生。在这之间的几个世纪里,人们实际上是在尝试农业的大小,如果你愿意的话,是在生产模式之间进行转换,就像他们来回转换他们的社会结构一样。
Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the Agricultural Revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity. And since there was no Eden-like state from which the first farmers could take their first steps on the road to inequality, it makes even less sense to talk about agriculture as marking the origins of social rank, inequality or private property. In the Fertile Crescent, it is – if anything – among upland groups, furthest removed from a dependence on agriculture, that we find stratification and violence becoming entrenched; while their lowland counterparts, who linked the production of crops to important social rituals, come out looking decidedly more egalitarian; and much of this egalitarianism relates to an increase in the economic and social visibility of women, reflected in their art and ritual. In that sense, the work of Gimbutas – while painted with brush strokes that were broad, sometimes to the point of caricature – was not entirely wide of the mark.
显然,在处理如此冗长和复杂的过程时,使用 “农业革命” 这样的短语已经没有任何意义了。由于没有类似伊甸园的状态,第一批农民可以在通往不平等的道路上迈出第一步,所以谈论农业标志着社会等级、不平等或私有财产的起源,就更没有意义了。在新月沃土,我们发现在远离农业依赖的高地群体中,分层和暴力变得根深蒂固;而将作物生产与重要的社会仪式联系在一起的低地同行,看起来显然更加平等;这种平等主义在很大程度上与妇女的经济和社会知名度的提高有关,反映在她们的艺术和仪式上。在这个意义上,金布塔斯的作品 —— 虽然用笔画得很宽泛,有时甚至到了漫画的地步 —— 并不完全是广义的。
All this raises an obvious question: if the adoption of farming actually set humanity, or some small part of it, on a course away from violent domination, what went wrong?
所有这些都提出了一个明显的问题:如果农业的采用实际上使人类,或其中的某一小部分,走上了远离暴力统治的道路,那么什么地方出了问题?
How farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed its way around the world
养殖业是如何首次在世界范围内跳跃、跌跌撞撞、虚张声势地发展的
In a way, the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East is unusual precisely because we know so much about what happened there. Long recognized as a crucible of plant and animal domestication, it has been more intensively studied by archaeologists than almost any other region outside Europe. This accumulation of evidence allows us to begin to tease out some of the social changes that accompanied the first steps to crop and animal domestication, even to rely to a certain extent on negative evidence. It is difficult, for instance, to make any sort of convincing argument that warfare was a significant feature of early farming societies in the Middle East, as by now one would expect some evidence for it to have shown up in the record. On the other hand, there is abundant evidence for the proliferation of trade and specialized crafts, and for the importance of female figures in art and ritual.
在某种程度上,中东的新月沃土是不寻常的,正是因为我们对那里发生的事情了解得太多了。长期以来,它被认为是植物和动物驯化的熔炉,考古学家对它的研究几乎比欧洲以外的任何其他地区都要深入。这种证据的积累使我们能够开始弄清伴随着作物和动物驯化的第一步的一些社会变化,甚至在一定程度上依靠负面的证据。例如,很难提出任何令人信服的论点,证明战争是中东地区早期农业社会的一个重要特征,因为到现在为止,人们期望在记录中出现一些战争的证据。另一方面,有大量的证据表明贸易和专业手工业的扩散,以及女性形象在艺术和仪式中的重要性。
For the same reasons, we’re able to draw comparisons between the lowland part of the Fertile Crescent (especially the Levantine Corridor passing via the Jordan valley) and its upland sector (the plains and foothills of eastern Turkey), where equally precocious developments in village life and local industries were associated with the raising of stone monuments adorned with masculine symbolism and an imagery of predatory violence.1 Some scholars have tried to see all these developments as somehow part of a single process, heading in the same general direction, towards the ‘birth of agriculture’. But the first farmers were reluctant farmers who seem to have understood the logistical implications of agriculture and avoided any major commitment to it. Their upland neighbours, also living settled lives in areas with diverse wild resources, had even less incentive to tie their existence to a narrow range of crops and livestock.
出于同样的原因,我们可以在新月沃土的低地部分(尤其是经过约旦河谷的黎凡特走廊)和高地部分(土耳其东部的平原和山麓)之间进行比较,在那里,村庄生活和地方工业的发展同样早熟,并与建造装饰有男性象征意义的石碑和掠夺性暴力的意象有关。1一些学者试图把所有这些发展看作是一个单一过程的一部分,朝着同一个大方向,朝着 “农业的诞生” 前进。但是,第一批农民是不情愿的农民,他们似乎了解农业的后勤影响,并避免对其作出任何重大承诺。他们的高地邻居也是生活在有各种野生资源的地区,他们更没有动力将自己的生存与狭窄的作物和牲畜联系起来。
If the situation in just one cradle of early farming was that complicated, then surely it no longer makes sense to ask, ‘what were the social implications of the transition to farming?’ – as if there was necessarily just one transition, and one set of implications. Certainly, it’s wrong to assume that planting seeds or tending sheep means one is necessarily obliged to accept more unequal social arrangements, simply to avert a ‘tragedy of the commons’. There is a paradox here. Most general works on the course of human history do actually assume something like this; but almost nobody, if pressed, would seriously defend such a point because it’s an obvious straw man. Any student of agrarian societies knows that people inclined to expand agriculture sustainably, without privatizing land or surrendering its management to a class of overseers, have always found ways to do so.
如果仅仅一个早期农业的摇篮的情况就如此复杂,那么,问 “向农业过渡的社会影响是什么” 肯定就没有意义了 —— 好像一定只有一个过渡和一套影响一样。当然,假设种植种子或放羊意味着一个人必须接受更不平等的社会安排,只是为了避免 “公地悲剧”,这是错误的。这里有一个悖论。大多数关于人类历史进程的一般著作实际上都假设了这样的事情;但几乎没有人,如果被逼问的话,会认真地为这样的观点辩护,因为它是一个明显的稻草人。任何研究农业社会的学生都知道,倾向于可持续地扩大农业的人们,在不将土地私有化或将其管理权交给监管者阶层的情况下,总是能找到办法做到这点。
Communal tenure, ‘open-field’ principles, periodic redistribution of plots and co-operative management of pasture are not particularly exceptional and were often practised for centuries in the same locations.2 The Russian mir is a famous example, but similar systems of land redistribution once existed all over Europe, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Balkans, occasionally into very recent times. The Anglo-Saxon term was run-rig or rundale . Of course, the rules of redistribution varied from one case to the next – in some, it was made per stirpes, in others according to the number of people in a family. Most often, the precise location of each strip was determined by lottery, with each family receiving one strip per land tract of differing quality, so that nobody was obliged to travel much further than anyone else to his fields or to work soil of consistently lower quality.3
公有制、“开放土地” 原则、定期重新分配土地和合作管理牧场并不是特别特殊的,而且往往在同一地点实行了几个世纪。2俄罗斯奇迹是一个著名的例子,但类似的土地再分配制度曾经存在于欧洲各地,从苏格兰高地到巴尔干半岛,偶尔也会出现在最近的时代。盎格鲁·撒克逊人的说法是run-rig或rundale。当然,重新分配的规则因人而异 —— 在一些情况下,它是根据每棵树进行的,而在另一些情况下则是根据一个家庭的人口数量进行的。最常见的情况是,每块土地的确切位置由抽签决定,每个家庭在不同质量的土地上获得一块土地,因此没有人必须比其他人走得更远才能到自己的田地,或耕种质量始终较差的土壤。3
Of course, it wasn’t just in Europe that such things happened. In his 1875 Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, Henry Sumner Maine – who held the first chair of historical and comparative jurisprudence at Oxford – was already discussing cases of periodic land redistribution and rundale -type institutions from India to Ireland, noting that almost up until his own day, ‘cases were frequent in which the arable land was divided into farms which shifted among the tenant-families periodically, and sometimes annually.’ And that in pre-industrial Germany, where land tenure was apportioned between ‘mark associations’, each tenant would receive lots divided among the three main qualities of soil. Importantly, he notes, these were not so much forms of property as ‘modes of occupation’, not unlike the rights of access found in many forager groups.4 We could go on piling up the examples (the Palestinian mash’a system, for instance, or Balinese subak) .5
当然,这种事情不仅仅发生在欧洲。在他 1875 年的《早期制度史讲座》中,亨利·萨姆纳·缅因 —— 他在牛津大学担任第一个历史和比较法学的主席 —— 已经在讨论从印度到爱尔兰的定期土地再分配和Rundale类型的制度,他指出,几乎直到他自己的时代,“可耕地被划分为农场,定期,有时每年在租户家庭之间转移的情况很常见。在工业化前的德国,土地使用权在 ” 标记协会 “之间分配,每个租户都会得到按三种主要土壤质量划分的地块。重要的是,他指出,这些并不是财产形式,而是” 占领模式 “,与许多觅食者群体中的使用权并不一样。4我们可以继续举出更多的例子(例如,巴勒斯坦的mash'a系统,或巴厘岛的subak)。5
In short, there is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from forager egalitarianism. It may have happened that way sometimes, but this can no longer be treated as a default assumption. As we saw in the last chapter, exactly the opposite seems true in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, at least for the first few thousand years after the appearance of farming. If the situation in just one cradle of early farming was so different from our evolutionary expectations, then we can only wonder what other stories remain to be told, in other places where farming emerged. Indeed, these other locations are multiplying in light of new evidence, genetic and botanical, as well as archaeological. It turns out the process was far messier, and far less unidirectional, than anyone had guessed; and so we have to consider a broader range of possibilities than once assumed. In this chapter, we’ll show just how much the picture is changing and point towards some of the surprising new patterns that are starting to emerge.
简而言之,根本没有理由假设在更遥远的时期采用农业也意味着私人土地所有权的开始、领土制度或不可逆转地离开觅食者的平均主义。有时可能会发生这种情况,但这不能再被当作一种默认的假设。正如我们在上一章中所看到的,在中东的新月沃土,至少在农耕出现后的最初几千年里,情况似乎正好相反。如果仅仅一个早期农业的摇篮的情况与我们的进化预期如此不同,那么我们只能想知道在其他出现农业的地方还有什么其他的故事要讲。事实上,根据新的证据,包括遗传学和植物学,以及考古学,这些其他地方正在成倍增加。事实证明,这个过程远比人们所猜测的要混乱,也远没有那么单向;因此,我们必须考虑比曾经假设的更多的可能性。在这一章中,我们将展示情况正在发生多大的变化,并指出开始出现的一些令人惊讶的新模式。
Geographers and historians used to believe that plants and animals were first domesticated in just a few ‘nuclear’ zones: the same areas in which large-scale, politically centralized societies later appeared. In the Middle East there was wheat and barley, as well as sheep, goats, pigs and cattle; in China there was rice (japonica), soybeans and a different variety of pig; potatoes, quinoa and llamas were brought under domestication in the Peruvian Andes; and maize, avocado and chilli in Mesoamerica. Such neat geographical alignments between early centres of crop domestication and the rise of centralized states invited speculation that the former led to the latter: that food production was responsible for the emergence of cities, writing, and centralized political organization, providing a surplus of calories to support large populations and elite classes of administrators, warriors and politicians. Invent agriculture – or so the story once went – and you set yourself on a course that will eventually lead to Assyrian charioteers, Confucian bureaucrats, Inca sun-kings or Aztec priests carrying away a significant chunk of your grain. Domination – and most often violent, ugly domination – was sure to follow; it was just a matter of time.
地理学家和历史学家曾经认为,植物和动物最初只在几个 “核” 区被驯化:也就是后来出现大规模、政治上集中的社会的地区。在中东有小麦和大麦,以及绵羊、山羊、猪和牛;在中国有水稻(粳米)、大豆和不同品种的猪;在秘鲁安第斯山脉有马铃薯、藜麦和骆驼被驯化;在中美洲有玉米、鳄梨和辣椒。早期作物驯化中心和中央集权国家的兴起之间的这种整齐的地理排列使人们猜测前者导致了后者:粮食生产是城市、文字和中央集权政治组织出现的原因,它提供了多余的热量来支持大量的人口和行政人员、战士和政治家的精英阶层。发明了农业 —— 或者说故事曾经是这样的 —— 你就走上了一条最终会导致亚述战车手、儒家官僚、印加太阳王或阿兹特克祭司带走你很大一部分谷物的道路。统治 —— 而且往往是暴力的、丑陋的统治 —— 肯定会随之而来;这只是一个时间问题。
Archaeological science has changed all this. Experts now identify between fifteen and twenty independent centres of domestication, many of which followed very different paths of development to China, Peru, Mesoamerica or Mesopotamia (which themselves all followed quite different paths, as we’ll see in later chapters). To those centres of early farming must now be added, among others, the Indian subcontinent (where browntop millet, mungbeans, horse gram, indica rice and humped zebu cattle were domesticated); the grasslands of West Africa (pearl millet); the central highlands of New Guinea (bananas, taroes and yams); the tropical forests of South America (manioc and peanuts); and the Eastern Woodlands of North America, where a distinct suite of local seed crops – goosefoot, sunflower and sumpweed – was raised, long before the introduction of maize from Mesoamerica.6
考古科学已经改变了这一切。专家们现在确定了 15 至 20 个独立的驯化中心,其中许多中心的发展道路与中国、秘鲁、中美洲或美索不达米亚截然不同(正如我们将在以后的章节中看到的那样,这些中心的发展道路都很不同)。除了这些早期农业中心之外,现在还必须加上印度次大陆(棕顶小米、绿豆、马齿苋、籼米和驼背斑马牛在那里被驯化);西非的草原(珍珠小米);新几内亚的中央高地(香蕉、芋头和山药)。南美洲的热带森林(木薯和花生);以及北美洲的东部林地,那里种植了一套独特的当地种子作物 —— 鹅掌楸、向日葵和闾丘露薇,这比从中美洲引进玉米还要早。6
We know much less about the prehistory of these other regions than we do about the Fertile Crescent. None followed a linear trajectory from food production to state formation. Nor is there any reason to assume a rapid spread of farming beyond them to neighbouring areas. Food production did not always present itself to foragers, fishers and hunters as an obviously beneficial thing. Historians painting with a broad brush sometimes write as if it did, or as if the only barriers to the ‘spread of farming’ were natural ones, such as climate and topography. This sets up something of a paradox, because even foragers living in highly suitable environments, and clearly aware of the possibilities of cereal-farming, often chose not to adopt it. Take Jared Diamond:
我们对这些其他地区的史前史的了解远远少于我们对新月沃土的了解。没有一个地区遵循从粮食生产到国家形成的线性轨迹。也没有任何理由认为农业会在这些地区之外迅速扩散到邻近地区。粮食生产对觅食者、渔民和猎人来说并不总是一件明显有益的事情。历史学家们有时会用大笔一挥,写得好像它确实如此,或者好像 “农耕传播” 的唯一障碍是自然障碍,如气候和地形。这就出现了一个悖论,因为即使是生活在高度适宜的环境中的觅食者,并且清楚地意识到谷物种植的可能性,也常常选择不采用这种方式。以 Jared Diamond 为例。
Just as some regions proved much more suitable than others for origins of food production, the ease of its spread also varied greatly around the world. Some areas that are ecologically very suitable for food production never acquired it in prehistoric times at all, even though areas of prehistoric food production existed nearby. The most conspicuous such examples are the failure of both farming and herding to reach Native American California from the U.S. Southwest or to reach Australia from New Guinea and Indonesia, and the failure of farming to spread from South Africa’s Natal Province to South Africa’s Cape.7
正如一些地区被证明比其他地区更适合粮食生产的起源一样,粮食传播的难易程度在世界各地也有很大差异。一些在生态学上非常适合粮食生产的地区在史前时期根本没有获得粮食,即使附近存在史前粮食生产的地区。这种,最明显的例子是农耕和放牧都没能从美洲西南部传到美洲加州本土,也没能从新几内亚和印度尼西亚传到澳大利亚,而农耕也没能从南非的纳塔尔省传到南非的海角。7
As we saw in Chapter Five, the failure of farming to ‘reach’ California is not a particularly compelling way to frame the problem. This is just an updated version of the old diffusionist approach, which identifies culture traits (cat’s cradles, musical instruments, agriculture and so on) and maps out how they migrate across the globe, and why in some places they fail to do so. In reality, there’s every reason to believe that farming ‘reached’ California just as soon as it reached anywhere else in North America. It’s just that (despite a work ethic that valorized strenuous labour, and a regional exchange system that would have allowed information about innovations to spread rapidly) people there rejected the practice as definitively as they did slavery.
正如我们在第五章所看到的,农业未能 “到达” 加利福尼亚并不是一个特别有说服力的问题框架。这只是旧的扩散主义方法的升级版,即确定文化特征(猫的摇篮、乐器、农业等),并描绘出它们如何在全球范围内迁移,以及为什么在某些地方它们未能这样做。在现实中,我们完全有理由相信,农业 “到达” 加利福尼亚就像它到达北美其他地方一样快。只是(尽管有一种重视艰苦劳动的工作伦理,以及一个允许创新信息迅速传播的区域交流系统),那里的人们像拒绝奴隶制一样明确地拒绝这种做法。
Even in the American Southwest, the overall trend for 500 years or so before Europeans arrived was the gradual abandonment of maize and beans, which people had been growing in some cases for thousands of years, and a return to a foraging way of life. If anything, during this period Californians were the ones doing the spreading, with populations originally from the east of the state bringing new foraging techniques, and replacing previously agricultural peoples, as far away as Utah and Wyoming. By the time Spaniards arrived in the Southwest, the Pueblo societies which had once dominated the region were reduced to isolated pockets of farmers, entirely surrounded by hunter-gatherers.8
即使在美洲西南部,在欧洲人到来之前的 500 年左右的总体趋势是逐渐放弃玉米和豆子,而人们在某些情况下已经种植了几千年,并回归到觅食的生活方式。如果有的话,在这一时期,加利福尼亚人是在进行传播,最初来自该州东部的人口带来了新的觅食技术,并取代了以前的农业人口,远至犹他州和怀俄明州。当西班牙人到达西南地区时,曾经主宰该地区的普韦布洛社会已经沦为孤立的小块农民,完全被狩猎·采集者所包围。8
In books on world history, you often encounter phrases like ‘crops and livestock spread rapidly through Eurasia’, or ‘the plant package of the Fertile Crescent launched food production from Ireland to the Indus’, or ‘maize diffused northwards at a snail’s pace.’ How appropriate is such language when describing the expansion of Neolithic economies many thousands of years ago?
在关于世界历史的书籍中,你经常会遇到这样的短语:“农作物和牲畜在欧亚大陆迅速传播”,或者 “新月沃土的植物包将粮食生产从爱尔兰推向印度河”,或者 “玉米以蜗牛的速度向北扩散”。在描述几千年前新石器时代的经济扩张时,这样的语言是多么的合适 ?
If anything, it seems to reflect the experience of the last few centuries, when Old World domesticates did indeed conquer the environments of the Americas and Oceania. In those more recent times, crops and livestock were able to ‘spread’ like wildfire, transforming existing habitats in ways that often rendered them unrecognizable within a few generations. But this has less to do with the nature of seed cultivation itself than with imperial and commercial expansion: seeds can spread very quickly if those carrying them have an army and are driven by the need endlessly to expand their enterprises to maintain profits. The Neolithic situation was altogether different. Especially for the first several thousand years after the end of the last Ice Age, most people were still not farmers, and farmers’ crops had to compete with a whole panoply of wild predators and parasites, most of which have since been eliminated from agricultural landscapes.
如果有的话,这似乎反映了过去几个世纪的经验,当时旧世界的驯化动物确实征服了美洲和大洋洲的环境。在那些较近的时代,作物和牲畜能够像野火一样 “蔓延”,改变现有的栖息地,往往在几代人的时间内使它们变得面目全非。但这与种子种植本身的性质关系不大,而是与帝国和商业扩张有关:如果携带种子的人有一支军队,并受无休止地扩大企业以维持利润的驱使,种子就能迅速传播。新石器时代的情况则完全不同。特别是在上个冰河时代结束后的最初几千年里,大多数人仍然不是农民,农民的作物不得不与一大批野生捕食者和寄生虫竞争,其中大部分后来都从农业景观中被消灭了。
To begin with, domestic plants and animals could not ‘spread’ beyond their original ecological limits without significant effort on the part of their human planters and keepers. Suitable environments not only had to be found but also modified by weeding, manuring, terracing, and so on. The landscape modifications involved may seem small-scale – little more than ecological tinkering – to our eyes, but they were onerous enough by local standards, and crucial in extending the range of domestic species.9 Of course, there were always paths of least resistance, topographical features and climatic regimes conducive or less conducive to the Neolithic economy. The east–west axis of Eurasia discussed by Jared Diamond in his Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) or the ‘lucky latitudes’ of Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules – For Now (2010) are ecological corridors of this sort.
首先,如果没有人类种植者和饲养者的巨大努力,家养的植物和动物不可能 “蔓延” 到它们原来的生态范围之外。不仅要找到合适的环境,还要通过除草、施肥、修筑梯田等方式进行改造。所涉及的景观改造在我们眼里可能是小规模的 —— 只不过是生态修补而已,但以当地的标准来看,这些改造足够繁重,而且对扩大国内物种的范围至关重要。9当然,总有一些阻力最小的路径、地形特征和气候制度有利于或不利于新石器时代的经济。贾里德·戴蒙德在他的《枪炮、病菌和钢铁》(1997 年)中讨论的欧亚大陆的东西轴线,或者伊恩·莫里斯的《西方为什么统治 —— 现在》(2010 年)中的 “幸运纬度” 都是这种生态走廊。
Eurasia, as these authors point out, has few equivalents to the sharp climatic variations of the Americas, or indeed of Africa. Terrestrial species can travel across the breadth of the Eurasian continent without crossing boundaries between tropical and temperate zones. Continents whose extremities tilt north to south are a different proposition, and perhaps less amenable to such ecological transfers. The basic geographical point is surely sound, at least for the last 10,000 years of history. It explains why cereals of Fertile Crescent origin are successfully grown today in such distant locations as Ireland and Japan. It may also explain, to some extent, why many thousands of years elapsed before American crops – such as maize or squash (first domesticated in the tropics) – were accepted in the temperate northern part of the American continent, by contrast with the relatively rapid adoption of Eurasian crops outside their areas of origin.
正如这些作者所指出的,欧亚大陆几乎没有与美洲或非洲的剧烈气候变化相提并论的地方。陆地物种可以穿越欧亚大陆的宽度,而不需要跨越热带和温带的界限。极端由北向南倾斜的大陆是一个不同的命题,也许不太适合于这种生态转移。基本的地理观点肯定是正确的,至少在过去一万年的历史上是如此。它解释了为什么起源于新月沃土的谷物今天能在爱尔兰和日本等遥远的地方成功种植。这也可以在一定程度上解释,为什么美洲作物 —— 如玉米或南瓜(最早在热带地区驯化) —— 经过数千年才在美洲大陆的温带北部被接受,相比之下,欧亚作物在其原产地以外的地区采用得相对迅速。
To what extent can such observations help to make sense of human history on a larger scale? How far can geography go in explaining history, rather than simply informing it?
这种观察能在多大程度上帮助在更大范围内理解人类历史?地理学在解释历史方面能走多远,而不仅仅是为其提供信息?
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, a geographer called Alfred W. Crosby came up with a number of important theories about how ecology shaped the course of history. Among other things, he was the first to draw attention to the ‘Columbian exchange’, the remarkable crossover of non-human species set in motion by Europeans’ arrival in the Americas after 1492, and its transformative effect on the global configuration of culture, economy and cuisine. Tobacco, peppers, potatoes and turkeys flowed into Eurasia; maize, rubber and chickens entered Africa; and citrus fruits, coffee, horses, donkeys and livestock travelled to the Americas. Crosby went on to argue that the global ascendance of European economies since the sixteenth century could be accounted for by a process he called ‘ecological imperialism’.10
早在 20 世纪 70 年代和 80 年代,一位名叫阿尔弗雷德-W-克罗斯比的地理学家提出了许多关于生态学如何塑造历史进程的重要理论。其中,他是第一个提请注意 “哥伦布交流” 的人,这是欧洲人在 1492 年后到达美洲而引发的非人类物种的显著交叉,以及它对全球文化、经济和饮食配置的变革性影响。烟草、胡椒、土豆和火鸡流入欧亚大陆;玉米、橡胶和鸡进入非洲;而柑橘类水果、咖啡、马、驴和牲畜则进入美洲。克罗斯比接着说,自 16 世纪以来,欧洲经济在全球的崛起可以用他称之为 “生态帝国主义” 的过程来解释。10
The temperate zones of North America and Oceania, as Crosby pointed out, were ideally suited to Eurasian crops and livestock; not only because of their climate, but because they possessed few native competitors and no local parasites, such as the various funguses, insects or field mice that have developed to specialize in sharing human-grown wheat. Unleashed on such fresh environments, Old World domesticates went into reproductive overdrive, even going feral again in some cases. Outgrowing and out-grazing local flora and fauna, they began to turn native ecosystems on their heads, creating ‘Neo-Europes’ – carbon copies of European environments, of the sort one sees today when driving through the countryside of New Zealand’s North Island, for example; or much of New England. The ecological assault on native habitats also included infectious diseases, such as smallpox and measles, which originated in Old World environments where humans and cattle cohabited. While European plants thrived in the absence of pests, diseases brought with domestic animals (or by humans accustomed to living alongside them) wreaked havoc on indigenous populations, creating casualty rates as high as 95 per cent, even in places where settlers were not enslaving or actively massacring the indigenous population – which, of course, they often were.
克罗斯比指出,北美洲和大洋洲的温带地区非常适合欧亚作物和牲畜;不仅因为它们的气候,还因为它们拥有很少的本地竞争者,也没有当地的寄生虫,如各种真菌、昆虫或田鼠,它们已经发展到专门分享人类种植的小麦。在这种新鲜的环境中,旧世界的驯养动物进入了繁殖的高峰期,甚至在某些情况下又变成了野生动物。他们超越了当地的植物和动物,开始颠覆当地的生态系统,创造了 “新欧洲” —— 欧洲环境的复制品,例如,今天人们开车经过新西兰北岛的乡村或新英格兰的大部分地区时看到的那种。对本地栖息地的生态攻击还包括传染病,如天花和麻疹,它们起源于人类和牛群共处的旧世界环境。 虽然欧洲植物在没有害虫的情况下茁壮成长,但与家畜(或习惯于与家畜生活在一起的人类)一起带来的疾病却对原住民造成了严重破坏,造成的伤亡率高达 95%,即使在定居者没有奴役或积极屠杀原住民的地方 —— 当然,他们经常如此。
Viewed in this light, the success of modern European imperialism owed more to ‘the Old World Neolithic Revolution’ – with its roots in the Fertile Crescent – than to the specific achievements of Columbus, Magellan, Cook and all the rest. And in a sense this is true. But the story of agricultural expansion before the sixteenth century is very far from being a one-way street; in fact, it is full of false starts, hiccups and reversals. This becomes truer the further back we go in time. To appreciate why, we will have to look beyond the Middle East to consider how the earliest farming populations fared in some other parts of the world after the end of the last Ice Age. But first there is a more basic point to address: why is our discussion of these issues confined only to the last 10,000 or so years of human history? Given that humans have been around for upwards of 200,000 years, why didn’t farming develop much earlier?
从这个角度来看,现代欧洲帝国主义的成功更多的是归功于 “旧世界的新石器时代革命” —— 其根源在新月沃土 —— 而不是哥伦布、麦哲伦、库克和所有其他人的具体成就。从某种意义上说,这是事实。但是,16 世纪之前的农业扩张故事远不是一条单行道;事实上,它充满了错误的开始、挫折和逆转。我们越往后看,这一点就越真实。为了理解其中的原因,我们将不得不把目光投向中东以外的地区,以考虑在上个冰河时期结束后,世界上其他一些地区最早的农业人口是如何生存的。但首先要解决的是一个更基本的问题:为什么我们对这些问题的讨论只局限于人类历史的最后一万年左右?鉴于人类已经存在了 20 多万年,为什么农耕没有更早地发展起来?
Since our species came into existence, there have been only two sustained periods of warm climate of the kind that might support an agricultural economy for long enough to leave some trace in the archaeological record.11 The first was the Eemian interglacial, which took place around 130,000 years ago. Global temperatures stabilized at slightly above their present-day levels, sustaining the spread of boreal forests as far north as Alaska and Finland. Hippos basked on the banks of the Thames and the Rhine. But the impact on human populations was limited by our then restricted geographical range. The second is the one we are living in now. When it began, around 12,000 years ago, people were already present on all the world’s continents, and in many different kinds of environment. Geologists call this period the Holocene, from Greek holos (entire), kainos (new).
自从我们的物种出现以来,只有两个持续的温暖气候时期,这种气候可能支持农业经济足够长的时间,在考古记录中留下一些痕迹。11第一次是大约 13 万年前的埃米亚间冰期。全球气温稳定在略高于今天的水平,维持了北方森林的蔓延,远至阿拉斯加和芬兰。河马在泰晤士河和莱茵河的河岸上晒太阳。但是,由于我们当时的地理范围有限,对人类人口的影响也很有限。第二个是我们现在所处的时代。当它开始的时候,大约在 12000 年前,人们已经存在于世界上所有的大陆,并且在许多不同的环境中。地质学家称这一时期为全新世,来自希腊语holos(整个),kainos(新)。
Many earth scientists now consider the Holocene over and done. For at least the last two centuries we have been entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which for the first time in history human activities are the main drivers of global climate change. Where exactly the Anthropocene begins is a scientific bone of contention. Most experts point to the Industrial Revolution, but some put its origins earlier, in the late 1500s and early 1600s. At that time, a global drop in surface air temperatures occurred – part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ – which natural forces can’t explain. Quite likely, European expansion in the Americas played a role. With perhaps 90 per cent of the indigenous population eliminated by the effects of conquest and infectious disease, forests reclaimed regions in which terraced agriculture and irrigation had been practised for centuries. In Mesoamerica, Amazonia and the Andes, some 50 million hectares of cultivated land may have reverted to wilderness. Carbon uptake from vegetation increased on a scale sufficient to change the Earth System and bring about a human-driven phase of global cooling.12
许多地球科学家现在认为 “全新世” 已经结束。至少在过去的两个世纪里,我们已经进入了一个新的地质时代,即 “人类世”,在这个时代,人类活动有史以来第一次成为全球气候变化的主要驱动力。人类世究竟从哪里开始是一个科学上的争论焦点。大多数专家指出是工业革命,但也有人认为其起源更早,在 15 世纪末和 16 世纪初。当时,全球地表空气温度下降 —— “小冰河时代” 的一部分 —— 自然力量无法解释。很可能,欧洲人在美洲的扩张起到了一定的作用。由于征服和传染病的影响,大约 90% 的原住民人口被消灭,森林在梯田农业和灌溉已经实行了几个世纪的地区开垦。在中美洲、亚马逊和安第斯山脉,约 5000 万公顷的耕地可能已经恢复为荒地。植被的碳吸收量增加,其规模足以改变地球系统,并带来一个由人类驱动的全球冷却阶段。12
Wherever one starts it, the Anthropocene is what we have done with the legacy of a Holocene Age, which in some ways had been a ‘clean sheet’ for humanity. At its onset, many things really were new. As the ice receded, flora and fauna – once confined to small refuge zones – spread out to new vistas. People followed, helping favoured species on their way by setting fires and clearing land. The effect of global warming on the world’s shorelines was more complex, as coastal shelves formerly under ice sprang back to the surface, while others sank below rising seawaters, fed from glacial melt.13 For many historians, the onset of the Holocene is significant because it created conditions for the origins of agriculture. Yet in many parts of the world, as we’ve already seen, it was also a Golden Age for foragers, and it’s important to remember that this forager paradise was the context in which the first farmers set up shop.
无论从哪个角度看,“人类世” 都是我们对 “全新世” 时代的遗产所做的事情,而 “全新世” 在某些方面对人类来说是一张 “白纸”。在它开始的时候,许多东西确实是新的。随着冰雪的消退,曾经被限制在小范围避难区的动植物群向新的远景扩散。人们紧随其后,通过放火和开垦土地来帮助他们喜欢的物种。全球变暖对世界海岸线的影响更为复杂,因为以前在冰层下的海岸架重新浮出水面,而其他海岸架则在冰川融化的作用下沉入上升的海水中。13对许多历史学家来说,全新世的开始是重要的,因为它为农业的起源创造了条件。然而,正如我们已经看到的,在世界的许多地方,这也是一个觅食者的黄金时代,重要的是要记住,这个觅食者的天堂是第一批农民开店的背景。
The most vigorous expansion of foraging populations was in coastal environments, freshly exposed by glacial retreat. Such locations offered a bonanza of wild resources. Saltwater fish and sea birds, whales and dolphins, seals and otters, crabs, shrimps, oysters, periwinkles and more besides. Freshwater rivers and lagoons, fed by mountain glaciers, now teemed with pike and bream, attracting migratory waterfowl. Around estuaries, deltas and lake margins, annual rounds of fishing and foraging took place at increasingly close range, leading to sustained patterns of human aggregation quite unlike those of the glacial period, when long seasonal migrations of mammoth and other large game structured much of social life.14
觅食人群最有力的扩张是在沿海环境中,由于冰川退缩而刚刚暴露出来。这些地方提供了丰富的野生资源。咸水鱼和海鸟、鲸鱼和海豚、海豹和水獭、螃蟹、虾、牡蛎、鲈鱼等等。由山地冰川提供水源的淡水河和泻湖,现在充斥着梭鱼和鳊鱼,吸引着。在河口、三角洲和湖泊边缘,每年的捕鱼和觅食活动在越来越近的距离内进行,导致了人类持续的聚集模式,这与冰川时期不同,当时猛犸象和其他大型猎物的长期季节性迁移构成了社会生活的大部分。14
Scrub and forest replaced open steppe and tundra across much of this postglacial world. As in earlier times, foragers used various techniques of land management to stimulate the growth of desired species, such as fruit and nut-bearing trees. By 8000 BC, their efforts had contributed to the extinction of roughly two-thirds of the world’s megafauna, which were ill suited to the warmer and more enclosed habitats of the Holocene.15 Expanding woodlands offered a superabundance of nutritious and storable foods: wild nuts, berries, fruits, leaves and fungi, processed with a new suite of composite (‘micro-lithic’) tools. Where forest took over from steppe, human hunting techniques shifted from the seasonal co-ordination of mass kills to more opportunistic and versatile strategies, focused on smaller mammals with more limited home ranges, among them elk, deer, boar and wild cattle.16
在这个后冰期世界的大部分地区,灌丛和森林取代了开放的草原和苔原。与早期一样,觅食者使用各种土地管理技术来刺激所需物种的生长,如水果和坚果树。到公元前 8000 年,他们的努力促成了世界上大约三分之二的巨型动物的灭绝,这些动物不适合全新世更温暖和更封闭的生境。15不断扩大的林地提供了丰富的营养和可储存的食物:野生坚果、浆果、水果、树叶和真菌,用一套新的复合(“微型石器”)工具加工。在森林取代草原的地方,人类的狩猎技术从季节性协调的大规模杀戮转变为更多的机会主义和多功能战略,重点是家庭范围更有限的小型哺乳动物,其中包括麋鹿、鹿、野猪和野牛。16
What is easy to forget, with hindsight, is that farmers entered into this whole new world very much as the cultural underdogs. Their earliest expansions were about as far removed as one could imagine from the missions civilisatrices of modern agrarian empires. Mostly, as we’ll see, they filled in the territorial gaps left behind by foragers: geographical spaces either too remote, inaccessible or simply undesirable to attract the sustained attention of hunters, fishers and gatherers. Even in such locations, these outlier economies of the Holocene would have decidedly mixed fortunes. Nowhere is this more dramatically illustrated than in the Early Neolithic period of central Europe, where farming endured one of its first and most conspicuous failures. To better understand the reasons why this failure occurred, we will then consider some more successful expansions of early farming populations in Africa, Oceania and the tropical lowlands of South America.
事后看来,人们很容易忘记的是,农民是以文化弱者的身份进入这个全新的世界的。他们最早的扩张与现代农业帝国的任务文明相去甚远。正如我们所看到的,他们主要是填补了觅食者留下的领土空白:这些地理空间要么过于偏远,要么无法进入,要么根本不值得吸引猎手、渔民和采集者的持续关注。即使在这样的地方,全新世的这些离群索居的经济也会有明显的混合命运。在欧洲中部的新石器时代早期,农业经历了其最初和最明显的失败,这一点在任何地方都体现得更为明显。为了更好地理解这种失败的原因,我们将考虑非洲、大洋洲和南美洲热带低地的早期农业人口的一些更成功的扩张。
Historically speaking, there is no direct connection among these cases; but what they show, collectively, is how the fate of early farming societies often hinged less on ‘ecological imperialism’ than on what we might call – to adapt a phrase from the pioneer of social ecology, Murray Bookchin – an ‘ecology of freedom’.17 By this we mean something quite specific. If peasants are people ‘existentially involved in cultivation’,18 then the ecology of freedom (‘play farming’, in short) is precisely the opposite condition. The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one’s existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death. It is just this sort of ecological flexibility that tends to be excluded from conventional narratives of world history, which present the planting of a single seed as a point of no return.
从历史上看,这些案例之间没有直接的联系;但它们共同表明的是,早期农业社会的命运往往不是取决于 “生态帝国主义”,而是取决于我们可以称之为 —— 改编自社会生态学先驱 Murray Bookchin 的一句话 —— “自由的生态学”。17我们的意思是相当具体的东西。如果农民是 “存在于耕作中” 的人。18那么自由的生态学(简而言之,“游戏耕作”)则恰恰是相反的条件。自由的生态学描述了人类社会的倾向性,即(自由地)进出耕作;在不完全成为农民的情况下进行耕作;在不把自己的存在过多地交给农业的后勤工作的情况下饲养作物和动物;保留一个足够广泛的食物网,以防止耕作成为一个生死攸关的问题。正是这种生态灵活性往往被排除在传统的世界历史叙事之外,这些叙事将种植一粒种子作为一个不归点。
Moving freely in and out of farming in this way, or hovering on its threshold, turns out to be something our species has done successfully for a large part of its past.19 Such fluid ecological arrangements – combining garden cultivation, flood-retreat farming on the margins of lakes or springs, small-scale landscape management (e.g. by burning, pruning and terracing) and the corralling or keeping of animals in semi-wild states, combined with a spectrum of hunting, fishing and collecting activities – were once typical of human societies in many parts of the world. Often these activities were sustained for thousands of years, and not infrequently supported large populations. As we’ll see, they may also have been crucial to the survival of those first human populations to incorporate domesticated plants and animals. Biodiversity – not bio-power – was the initial key to the growth of Neolithic food production.
以这种方式自由进出农耕,或在农耕的门槛上徘徊,原来是我们的物种在过去的大部分时间里成功地做过的事情。19这种流动的生态安排 —— 结合花园种植、湖泊或泉水边缘的退水农业、小规模的景观管理(例如通过燃烧、修剪和梯田)以及在半野生状态下圈养或饲养动物,再加上一系列的狩猎、捕鱼和采集活动 —— 曾经是世界上许多地方的人类社会的典型。这些活动往往持续了数千年,并经常支持大量人口。正如我们将看到的那样,这些活动可能也对那些最早加入驯化植物和动物的人类群体的生存至关重要。生物多样性 —— 而不是生物动力 —— 是新石器时代食物生产增长的最初关键。
Kilianstädten, Talheim, Schletz and Herxheim are all names of Early Neolithic sites on the loess plains of Austria and Germany. Collectively, they tell a very unfamiliar story of early agriculture.
Kilianstädten、Talheim、Schletz 和 Herxheim 都是奥地利和德国黄土平原上的新石器时代早期遗址的名称。它们共同讲述了一个非常陌生的早期农业故事。
In these places, starting around 5500 BC, villages of a similar cultural outlook – known as the ‘Linear Pottery’ tradition – were established. They are among the villages of central Europe’s first farmers. But, unlike most other early farming settlements, each ended its life in a period of turmoil, marked by the digging and filling of mass graves. The contents of these graves attest to the annihilation, or attempted annihilation, of an entire community: crudely dug trenches or reused ditches containing chaotic jumbles of human remains, including adults and children of both sexes, disposed of like so much refuse. Their bones show the telltale marks of torture, mutilation and violent death – the breaking of limbs, taking of scalps, butchering for cannibalism. At Kilianstädten and Asparn, younger women were missing from the assemblage, suggesting their appropriation as captives.20
在这些地方,大约从公元前 5500 年开始,建立了具有类似文化面貌的村庄 —— 被称为 “线性陶器” 传统。它们是欧洲中部第一批农民的村庄之一。但是,与其他大多数早期农业定居点不同的是,每个村庄都是在动荡时期结束其生命的,其标志是挖掘和填补集体坟墓。这些坟墓的内容证明了整个社区的毁灭,或试图毁灭:粗略挖掘的壕沟或重复使用的沟渠里有杂乱无章的人类遗骸,包括成人和男女儿童,像许多垃圾一样被处理掉。他们的骨头显示出酷刑、残害和暴力死亡的痕迹 —— 断肢、剥头皮、为食人而屠戮。在基里安斯坦和阿斯帕恩,年轻的妇女在这些尸体中不见踪影,这表明她们被当作俘虏使用。20
The Neolithic farming economy had arrived in central Europe, carried by migrants from the southeast, and with ultimately catastrophic consequences for some of those whose ancestors brought it there.21 The earliest settlements of these newcomers to the central European plains suggest a relatively free society, with few indicators of status difference either within or between communities. Their basic family units – timber longhouses – were all approximately the same size; but around 5000 BC, disparities began to appear between them, as also in the kind of goods placed with their dead. People enclosed their settlements within large ditches, which yield evidence of warfare in the forms of arrows, axe heads and human remains. In some cases, when the sites were overrun, these ditches were turned into mass graves for the residents they had failed to defend.22
新石器时代的农耕经济由来自东南部的移民带入中欧,并最终给那些将其带到这里的祖先带来了灾难性的后果。21这些新来者在中欧平原的最早定居点表明,这是一个相对自由的社会,社区内部或社区之间几乎没有地位差异的迹象。他们的基本家庭单位 —— 木制长屋 —— 的大小大致相同;但在公元前 5000 年左右,他们之间开始出现差异,在死者身上放置的物品种类也出现了差异。人们把他们的居住地围在大沟里,这些沟里有箭、斧头和人类遗骸等战争的证据。在某些情况下,当遗址被占领时,这些沟渠被变成了他们未能保卫的居民的集体坟墓。22
Such is the quality and quantity of accurately dated material that researchers are able to model demographic trends accompanying these changes. Their reconstructions have come as something of a surprise. The arrival of farming in central Europe was associated with an initial and quite massive upsurge in population – which is of course exactly what one would expect. But what followed was not the anticipated ‘up and up’ pattern of demographic growth. Instead came a disastrous downturn, a boom and bust, between 5000 and 4500 BC, and something approaching a regional collapse.23 These Early Neolithic groups arrived, they settled, and then in many (but, we should emphasize, not all) areas their numbers dwindled into obscurity, while in others they were bolstered through intermarriage with more established forager populations. Only after a hiatus of roughly 1,000 years did extensive cereal-farming take off again in central and northern Europe.24
准确年代的材料的质量和数量如此之高,以至于研究人员能够对伴随这些变化的人口趋势进行建模。他们的重建工作让人感到惊讶。耕作在中欧的到来与最初相当大规模的人口激增有关 —— 这当然正是人们所期望的。但随后发生的事情并不是预期的人口增长的 “上升” 模式。相反,在公元前 5000 年到 4500 年之间,出现了灾难性的衰退,繁荣和萧条,以及接近于区域性的崩溃。23这些早期新石器时代的群体来到这里,他们定居下来,然后在许多(但我们应该,强调不是所有)地区,他们的数量减少到默默无闻,而在其他地区,他们通过与更成熟的觅食者人口通婚而得到加强。只有在中断了大约 1000 年之后,欧洲中部和北部才再次出现了广泛的谷物种植。24
Older narratives of prehistory tended simply to assume that Neolithic colonists held the upper hand over native foraging populations, demographically and socially; that they either replaced them, or converted them to a superior way of life through trade and intermarriage. The boom-and-bust pattern of early farming now documented in temperate Europe contradicts this picture and raises wider questions about the viability of Neolithic economies in a world of foragers. To address these questions, we need to know a bit more about the foraging populations themselves, and how they developed their Pleistocene traditions after the Ice Age and into the Holocene.
旧的史前史叙述倾向于简单地假设,新石器时代的殖民者在人口和社会方面都比本地觅食者占优势;他们要么取代他们,要么通过贸易和通婚将他们转化为一种更优越的生活方式。现在在温带欧洲记录的早期农业的繁荣和萧条模式与这种情况相矛盾,并提出了关于新石器时代经济在觅食者世界中的可行性的更广泛问题。为了解决这些问题,我们需要更多地了解觅食者本身,以及他们是如何在冰河时代之后和进入全新世之后发展他们的更新世传统的。
Much of what we know about postglacial (Mesolithic) forager populations in Europe derives from findings along the Baltic and Atlantic coasts. Much more is lost to the sea. We learn a great deal about these Holocene hunter-foragers from their funerary customs. From northern Russia through Scandinavia, and down to the Breton coast, they are illuminated by finds of prehistoric cemeteries. Quite often, the burials were richly adorned. In the Baltic and Iberian regions they include copious amounts of amber. Corpses lie in striking postures – sitting or leaning, even flipped on their heads – suggesting complex and now largely unfathomable codes of hierarchy. On the fringes of northern Eurasia, peat bogs and waterlogged sites preserve glimpses of a wood-carving tradition that produced decorated ski runners, sledges, canoes and monuments resembling the totem poles of the Pacific Northwest Coast.25 Staffs topped with elk and reindeer effigies, reminiscent of Pleistocene rock art depictions, appear over broad areas: a stable symbolism of authority, crossing the boundaries of local foraging groups.26
我们对欧洲冰期后(中石器时代)觅食者人口的了解,大部分来自于波罗的海和大西洋沿岸的发现。更多的信息被大海淹没了。我们从这些全新世的狩猎者的丧葬习俗中了解到大量的信息。从俄罗斯北部到斯堪的纳维亚半岛,再到布列塔尼海岸,都有史前墓地的发现。这些墓葬通常都有丰富的装饰品。在波罗的海和伊比利亚地区,它们包括大量的琥珀。尸体以惊人的姿势躺在地上 —— 坐着或靠着,甚至翻转着头 —— 表明复杂的、现在基本上无法理解的等级制度准则。在欧亚大陆北部的边缘地区,泥炭沼泽和积水的遗址保留了木雕传统的一瞥,这种传统产生了装饰的滑雪板、雪橇、独木舟和类似于太平洋西北海岸图腾柱的纪念碑。25杖顶上有麋鹿和驯鹿的雕像,让人想起更新世岩画的描述,出现在广泛的地区:这是一种稳定的权威象征,跨越了当地觅食群体的界限。26
How did Europe’s deep interior, where incoming farmers settled, look from the vantage point of these established Mesolithic populations? Most probably like an ecological dead end, lacking the obvious advantages of coastal environments. It may have been precisely this that allowed Linear Pottery colonists to spread freely west and north on the loess plains to begin with: they were moving into areas with little or no prior occupation. Whether that reflects a conscious policy of avoiding local foragers is unclear. What’s clearer is that this wave of advance began to break as the new farming groups approached more densely populated coastlands. What exactly this might have meant in practice is often ambiguous. For example, human remains of coastal foragers, found on Mesolithic sites in Brittany, show anomalous levels of terrestrial protein in the diet of many young females, contrasting with the general prevalence of marine foods among the rest of the population. It seems that women of inland origin (who until then had been eating largely meat, not fish) were joining coastal groups.27
从这些成熟的中石器时代人口的角度来看,欧洲的内陆深处,即外来农民定居的地方,看起来如何?很可能像一个生态死角,缺乏沿海环境的明显优势。也许正是这种,使得线性陶器殖民者一开始就能在黄土高原上自由地向西和向北扩展:他们正在向以前很少或没有人占领的地区迁移。这是否反映了一种有意识的避开当地觅食者的政策尚不清楚。更清楚的是,当新的农业群体接近人口更稠密的海岸线时,这种推进的浪潮开始中断。这在实践中到底意味着什么,往往是模糊不清的。例如,在布列塔尼的中石器时代遗址中发现的沿海觅食者的人类遗骸显示,许多年轻女性的饮食中陆生蛋白质的水平异常,与其他人口中普遍存在的海洋食物形成鲜明对比。看来,来自内陆的妇女(在此之前,她们主要吃肉,而不是鱼)正在加入沿海群体。27
What does this tell us? It may indicate that women had been captured and transported in raids, conceivably including raids by foragers on farming communities.28 This can only be speculative; we cannot know for sure that women moved involuntarily, or even that they moved at the behest of men. And while raiding and warfare were clearly part of the picture, it would be simplistic to attribute the initial failure of Neolithic farming in Europe to such factors alone. We’ll consider some broader explanations in due course. First, though, we should take a reprieve from Europe and examine some of the success stories of early farming. We will start with Africa, then move on to Oceania, and lastly the rather different but instructive case of Amazonia.
这告诉我们什么?这可能表明,妇女在袭击中被俘虏和运送,可以想象,包括觅食者对农业社区的袭击。28这只能是推测;我们无法确定妇女是在非自愿的情况下行动的,甚至无法确定她们是在男人的授意下行动的。虽然袭击和战争显然是其中的一部分,但把欧洲新石器时代农业的最初失败仅仅归咎于这些因素,那就太简单了。我们将在适当的时候考虑一些更广泛的解释。不过,首先,我们应该从欧洲缓过神来,研究一些早期农业的成功故事。我们将从非洲开始,然后转到大洋洲,最后是亚马逊地区这个相当不同但具有启发性的案例。
Around the time that Linear Pottery settlements were established in central Europe, the Neolithic farming economy made its first appearance in Africa. The African variant had the same ultimate origin, in Southwest Asia. It comprised the same basic suite of crops (emmer wheat and einkorn) and animals (domestic sheep, goats and cattle – with perhaps some admixture of local African aurochs). Yet the African reception of this Neolithic ‘package’ could not have been more different. It is almost as if the first African farmers opened up the package, threw out some of the contents, then rewrapped it in such strikingly distinct ways that one could easily mistake it for a completely local invention. As, in many ways, it was.
大约在线性陶器定居点在欧洲中部建立的时候,新石器时代的农业经济在非洲首次出现。非洲的变体有相同的最终起源,即西南亚。它包括相同的基本农作物(艾美尔小麦和艾美尔玉米)和动物(家养绵羊、山羊和牛 —— 也许还掺杂了一些当地的非洲黑牛)。然而,非洲人对这种新石器时代的 “套餐” 的接受情况却不尽相同。几乎可以说,第一批非洲农民打开了这个包装,扔掉了其中的一些内容,然后以如此鲜明的方式重新包装,以至于人们很容易将其误认为是一个完全本地的发明。因为,在许多方面,它确实是。
The place where much of this happened was a region largely ignored by foragers until then, but soon to become a major axis of demographic and political change: the Nile valley of Egypt and Sudan. By 3000 BC, the political integration of its lower reaches with the Nile delta would produce the first territorial kingdom of ancient Egypt, facing the Mediterranean. However, the cultural roots of this and all later Nilotic civilizations lay in much earlier transformations, linked to the adoption of farming between 5000 and 4000 BC, with their centre of gravity more firmly in Africa. These first African farmers reinvented the Neolithic in their own image. Cereal cultivation was relegated to a minor pursuit (regaining its status only centuries later), and the idea that one’s social identity was represented by hearth and home was largely thrown out too. In their place came a quite different Neolithic: supple, vibrant and travelling on the hoof.29
发生这一切的地方是一个在此之前基本上被觅食者忽视的地区,但很快就成为人口和政治变化的主要轴心:埃及和苏丹的尼罗河流域。到公元前 3000 年,尼罗河下游地区与尼罗河三角洲的政治整合将产生古埃及的第一个领土王国,面向地中海。然而,这个文明和所有后来的尼罗河文明的文化根源在于更早的转变,与公元前 5000 年和公元前 4000 年之间采用的农耕方式有关,其重心在非洲更牢固。这些最早的非洲农民以他们自己的形象重塑了新石器时代。谷物种植被降格为次要的追求(几百年后才恢复其地位),一个人的社会身份由炉灶和家庭来代表的想法也被基本抛弃了。取而代之的是一个完全不同的新石器时代:柔韧、充满活力、奔波劳碌。29
This new form of Neolithic economy relied heavily on livestock-herding, combined with annual rounds of fishing, hunting and foraging on the rich floodplain of the Nile, and in the oases and seasonal streams (wadis) of what are now the neighbouring deserts, which were then still watered by annual rains. Herders moved periodically in and out of this ‘Green Sahara’, both west and east to the Red Sea coast. Complex systems of bodily display developed. New forms of personal adornment employed cosmetic pigments and minerals, prospected from the adjacent deserts, and a dazzling array of beadwork, combs, bangles and other ornaments made of ivory and bone, all richly attested in Neolithic cemeteries running the length of the Nile valley, from Central Sudan to Middle Egypt.30
这种新形式的新石器时代经济严重依赖牲畜放牧,再加上每年在尼罗河丰富的洪泛区以及现在邻近沙漠的绿洲和季节性溪流(瓦迪)中捕鱼、打猎和觅食,这些地方当时仍有每年的雨水浇灌。牧民们定期进出这个 “绿色撒哈拉”,无论是向西还是向东到红海海岸。复杂的身体展示系统得到发展。新的个人装饰形式采用了从邻近沙漠中勘探出来的化妆品颜料和矿物,以及一系列令人眼花缭乱的珠子、梳子、手镯和其他象牙和骨头制成的装饰品,所有这些都在从苏丹中部到中埃及的尼罗河流域的新石器时代墓地中得到了丰富的证明。30
What survives today of this amazing gear now graces the shelves of museum displays the world over, reminding us that – before there were pharaohs – almost anyone could hope to be buried like a king, queen, prince or princess.
这种惊人的装备今天所剩无几,现在已经成为世界各地博物馆陈列架上的亮点,提醒我们 —— 在有法老之前 —— 几乎任何人都希望像国王、女王、王子或公主一样被埋葬。
Another of the world’s great Neolithic expansions took place in island Oceania. Its origins lay at the other end of Asia, in the rice- and millet-growing cultures of Taiwan and the Philippines (the deeper roots are in China). Around 1600 BC a striking dispersal of farming groups took place, starting here and ending over 5,000 miles to the east in Polynesia.
世界上另一个伟大的新石器时代的扩张发生在大洋洲岛屿。它的起源是在亚洲的另一端,在台湾和菲律宾的稻米和小米种植文化中(更深的根源在中国)。公元前 1600 年左右,农业群体发生了惊人的分散,从这里开始,到东边 5000 多英里外的波利尼西亚结束。
Known as the ‘Lapita horizon’ (after the site in New Caledonia where its decorated pottery was first identified), this precocious expansion – which called into being the world’s first deep-ocean outrigger canoes – is often connected to the spread of Austronesian languages. Rice and millet, poorly suited to tropical climates, were jettisoned in its early stages of dispersal. But as the Lapita horizon advanced, their place was taken by a rich admixture of tubers and fruit crops encountered along the way, together with a growing menagerie of animal domesticates (pigs, joined by dogs and chickens; rats too hitched along for the ride). These species travelled with Lapita colonists to previously uninhabited islands – among them Fiji, Tonga and Samoa – where they put down roots (quite literally, in the case of taro and other tubers).31
被称为 “拉皮塔地平线”(以新喀里多尼亚首次发现其装饰陶器的地点命名),这种早熟的扩张 —— 它唤起了世界上第一艘深海独木舟 —— 通常与奥罗尼西亚语言的传播有关。水稻和小米不适合热带气候,在其传播的早期阶段被抛弃。但随着拉皮塔人地平线的推进,他们的位置被沿途遇到的丰富的块茎和水果作物所取代,同时还有越来越多的驯养动物(猪、狗和鸡的加入;老鼠也搭上了顺风车)。这些物种与拉皮塔殖民者一起来到以前无人居住的岛屿 —— 其中包括斐济、汤加和萨摩亚 —— 在那里扎下根来(就芋头和其他块茎而言,确实如此)。31
Like the Linear Pottery farmers of central Europe, Lapita groups seem to have avoided established centres of population. They gave a wide berth to the forager stronghold of Australia, and skirted largely clear of Papua New Guinea, where a local form of farming was already well established in the uplands around the Wahgi valley.32 On virgin islands and beside vacant lagoons they founded their villages, comprising houses perched on stilts. With stone adzes, a mainstay of their travelling toolkit, they cleared patches of forest to make gardens for their crops – taroes, yams and bananas – which they supplemented with animal domesticates and a rich diet of fish, shellfish and marine turtles, wild birds and fruit bats.33
与中欧的线性陶器农民一样,拉皮塔群体似乎也避开了既定的人口中心。他们避开了澳大利亚的觅食者据点,并在很大程度上避开了巴布亚新几内亚,在那里,当地的农业形式已经在瓦吉河谷周围的高地建立起来。32在处女岛和空旷的泻湖旁,他们建立了自己的村庄,包括栖息在高跷上的房屋。他们用石锛(他们旅行中的主要工具)清除了成片的森林,为他们的作物 —— 芋头、山药和香蕉 —— 开辟了花园,他们用动物驯化剂和丰富的鱼、贝类和海龟、野生鸟类和果蝠作为补充。33
Unlike Europe’s first farmers, the carriers of the Lapita horizon diversified their economy continuously as they spread. And this was not just true of their crops and animals. Voyaging eastwards, Lapita peoples left a trail of distinctive pottery, their most consistent signal in the archaeological record. Along the way they also encountered many new materials. The most valued, such as particular types of shell, were crafted into multi-media ornaments – arm rings, necklaces, pendants – which left a trace on Melanesian and Polynesian island culture that was still visible many centuries later, when Captain Cook (unwittingly retracing the steps of Lapita) caught sight of New Caledonia in 1774 and wrote that it reminded him of Scotland.
与欧洲的第一批农民不同,拉皮塔地平线的携带者随着他们的传播不断地使他们的经济多样化。而且,这不仅仅是他们的作物和动物的情况。拉皮塔人向东航行时,留下了一串独特的陶器,这是他们在考古记录中最一致的信号。一路上,他们还遇到了许多新材料。最有价值的材料,如特殊类型的贝壳,被制作成多媒体装饰品 —— 臂环、项链、吊坠 —— 在美拉尼西亚和波利尼西亚的岛屿文化上留下了,这在许多世纪后仍然可见,1774 年库克船长(无意中重走拉皮塔的足迹)看到了新喀里多尼亚,并写道,它让他想起了苏格兰。
Lapita prestige items also included bird-feather headdresses (depicted on the pottery), fine pandanus leaf mats and obsidian. Obsidian blades, circulating thousands of miles away from their sources in the Bismarck Archipelago, were used in tattooing and scarification to apply pigment and plant matter to the skin. While the tattoos themselves do not survive, the impressed decoration of Lapita pots gives some hint of their underlying schema, transferred from skin to ceramic. More recent traditions of Polynesian tattooing and body art – ‘wrapping the body in images’, as a famous anthropological study puts it – remind us how little we really know of the vibrant conceptual worlds of earlier times, and those who first carried such practices across remote Pacific island-scapes.34
拉皮塔人的尊贵物品还包括鸟羽头饰(在陶器上有描绘)、精美的丹顶鹤叶垫和黑曜石。黑曜石刀片从俾斯麦群岛的源头流传到数千英里之外,被用于纹身和结疤,在皮肤上涂抹颜料和植物物质。虽然纹身本身并不存在,但拉皮塔壶的压印装饰给了他们从皮肤转移到陶瓷的基本模式的一些暗示。最近的波利尼西亚纹身和人体艺术传统 —— “用图像包裹身体”,正如一项著名的人类学研究所说 —— 提醒我们,我们对早期充满活力的概念世界所知甚少,而那些最早将这种做法带过遥远的太平洋岛屿的人也是如此。34
On first inspection, these three variations on ‘the Neolithic’ – European, African, Oceanic – might seem to have almost nothing in common. However, all share two important features. First, each involved a serious commitment to farming. Of the three, the Linear Pottery culture of Europe enmeshed itself most deeply in the raising of cereals and livestock. The Nile valley was fully wedded to its herds, as was the Lapita to its pigs and yams. In every case, the species in question was fully domesticated, reliant on human intervention for its survival, and was no longer able to reproduce unassisted in the wild. For their part, the people in question had oriented their lives around the needs of certain plants and animals; enclosing, protecting and breeding those species was a perennial feature of their existence and a cornerstone of their diets. All of them had become ‘serious’ farmers.
乍一看,这三种 “新石器时代” 的变体 —— 欧洲、非洲、大洋洲 —— 似乎几乎没有任何共同之处。然而,它们都有两个重要特征。首先,每一种都涉及对农业的认真承诺。在这三种文化中,欧洲的线性陶器文化与谷物和牲畜的饲养关系最深。尼罗河流域与它的畜群完全结合在一起,正如拉皮塔与它的猪和山药一样。在每一种情况下,有关的物种都被完全驯化,依靠人类的干预而生存,并且不再能够在没有帮助的情况下在野外繁殖。就这些人而言,他们的生活是围绕着某些植物和动物的需求展开的;圈养、保护和繁殖这些物种是他们生存的一个长期特征,也是他们饮食的基石。他们都已成为 “严肃” 的农民。
Second, all three cases involved a targeted spread of farming to lands largely uninhabited by existing populations. The highly mobile Neolithic of the Nile valley extended seasonally into the adjacent steppe-desert, but avoided regions that were already densely settled, such as the Nile delta, the Sudanese gezira and the major oases (including the Fayum, where lakeside fisher-foragers prevailed, adopting and abandoning farming practices largely as it suited them).35 Similarly, the Linear Pottery culture of Europe took root in niches left open by Mesolithic foragers, such as patches of loess soil and unused river levees. The Lapita horizon, too, was a relatively closed system, interacting with others when necessary, but otherwise enfolding new resources into its own pattern of life. Serious farmers tended to form societies with hard boundaries, ethnic and, in some cases, also linguistic.36
第二,所有这三种情况都涉及到有针对性地将农耕推广到现有人口基本无人居住的土地上。尼罗河流域高度流动的新石器时代,季节性地延伸到邻近的草原·沙漠,但避开了已经密集定居的地区,如尼罗河三角洲、苏丹的gezira和主要的绿洲(包括法尤姆,那里盛行湖边的渔民,主要根据自己的情况采用和放弃耕作方式)。35同样,欧洲的线性陶器文化也在中石器时代觅食者留下的壁龛中扎根,例如成片的黄土和未使用的河堤。拉皮塔地平线也是一个相对封闭的系统,必要时与他人互动,但在其他方面将新资源纳入自己的生活模式。严肃的农民倾向于形成有严格边界的社会,包括种族,在某些情况下也包括语言。36
But not all early farming expansions were of this ‘serious’ variety. In the lowland tropics of South America, archaeological research has uncovered a distinctly more playful tradition of Holocene food production. Similar practices were still widely in evidence in Amazonia until recently, such as we found among the Nambikwara of Brazil’s Mato Grosso region. Well into the twentieth century, they spent the rainy season in riverside villages, clearing gardens and orchards to grow a panoply of crops including sweet and bitter manioc, maize, tobacco, beans, cotton, groundnuts, gourds and more besides. Cultivation was a relaxed affair, with little effort spent on keeping different species apart. And as the dry season commenced, these tangled house gardens were abandoned altogether. The entire group dispersed into small nomadic bands to hunt and forage, only to begin the whole process again the following year, often in a different location.
但并非所有的早期农业扩张都是这种 “严肃” 的类型。在南美洲的低地热带地区,考古研究发现了全新世食物生产的一个明显的更好玩的传统。直到最近,类似的做法在亚马逊地区仍然广泛存在,如我们在巴西马托格罗索地区的南比克瓦拉人中发现的那样。一直到二十世纪,他们在河边的村庄里度过雨季,开垦花园和果园,种植各种作物,包括甜木薯、玉米、烟草、豆类、棉花、花生、葫芦和其他作物。耕种是一件轻松的事情,几乎没有花什么精力把不同的物种分开。随着旱季的到来,这些错综复杂的家庭花园被完全放弃了。整个群体分散成小规模的游牧带,去打猎和觅食,只是在第二年又开始了整个过程,往往是在不同的地方。
In Greater Amazonia, such seasonal moves in and out of farming are documented among a wide range of indigenous societies and are of considerable antiquity.37 So is the habit of keeping pets. It is often stated that Amazonia has no indigenous animal domesticates, and from a biological standpoint this is true. From a cultural perspective, things look more complicated. Many rainforest groups carry with them what can only be described as a small zoo comprising tamed forest creatures: monkeys, parrots, collared peccaries, and so on. These pets are often the orphaned offspring of animals hunted and killed for food. Taken in by human foster-parents, fed and nurtured through infancy, they become utterly dependent on their masters. This subservience lasts into maturity. Pets are not eaten. Nor are their keepers interested in breeding them. They live as individual members of the community, who treat them much like children, as subjects of affection and sources of amusement.38
在大亚马逊地区,这种季节性地进出农田的行为在广泛的原住民社会中都有记录,而且有相当长的历史了。37养宠物的习惯也是如此。人们常说,亚马逊地区没有本土的动物驯化,从生物学的角度看,这是事实。从文化的角度来看,事情显得更加复杂。许多雨林群体随身携带的只能说是一个由驯服的森林生物组成的小动物园:猴子、鹦鹉、领头山雀等等。这些宠物往往是被猎杀的动物的孤儿后代。他们被人类养父母收留,在婴儿期得到喂养和培养,成为完全依赖主人的动物。这种顺从性一直持续到成熟期。宠物是不会被吃掉的。它们的饲养者也不对它们的繁殖感兴趣。他们作为社区的个体成员生活,社区对待他们就像对待孩子一样,作为感情的对象和娱乐的来源。38
Amazonian societies blur our conventional distinction between ‘wild’ and ‘domestic’ in other ways. Animals they routinely hunt and capture for food include peccary, agouti and others we would classify as ‘wild’. Yet these same species are locally considered as already domesticated, at least in the sense of being subjects of supernatural ‘masters of the animals’ who protect them and to whom they are bound. ‘Master’ or ‘Mistress of the Animals’ figures are actually very common in hunting societies; sometimes they take the form of a huge or perfect specimen of a certain type of beast, a kind of embodiment of the species, but at the same time they appear as human or humanlike owners of the species, to whom the souls of all deer, or seals, or caribou must be returned after hunters take them. In Amazonia, what this means in practice is that people avoid intervening in the reproduction of those particular species lest they usurp the role of spirits.
亚马逊社会在其他方面模糊了我们对 “野生” 和 “家养” 的传统区分。他们经常猎取和捕获的动物包括山雀、Agouti 和其他我们归类为 “野生” 的动物。然而,这些同样的物种在当地被认为已经被驯化了,至少在作为超自然的 “动物主人” 的对象的意义上是这样的,他们保护这些动物并对其进行约束。动物主人 “或” 动物女主人 "的形象在狩猎社会中实际上是非常普遍的;有时他们采取某种野兽的巨大或完美标本的形式,是该物种的一种化身,但同时他们也作为人类或类似人类的物种主人出现,在猎人带走所有鹿或海豹或驯鹿后,必须将它们的灵魂还给他们。在亚马逊地区,这实际上意味着人们避免干预这些特定物种的繁衍,以免他们篡夺了神灵的角色。
In other words, there was no obvious cultural route, in Amazonia, that might lead humans to become both the primary carers for and consumers of other species; relationships were either too remote (in the case of game) or too intimate (in the case of pets). We are dealing here with people who possess all the requisite ecological skills to raise crops and livestock, but who nevertheless pull back from the threshold, maintaining a careful balancing act between forager (or better, perhaps, forester) and farmer.39
换句话说,在亚马逊地区,没有明显的文化路线,可能导致人类成为其他物种的主要照顾者和消费者;这种关系要么太遥远(就野味而言),要么太亲密(就宠物而言)。我们在这里处理的是拥有所有必要的生态技能来饲养作物和牲畜的人,但他们还是从门槛上退了回来,在觅食者(或更好的,也许是林务员)和农民之间保持着一种谨慎的平衡。39
Amazonia shows how this ‘in-and-out-of-farming’ game could be far more than a transient affair. It seems to have played out over thousands of years, since during that time there is evidence of plant domestication and land management, but little commitment to agriculture.40 From 500 BC, this neotropical mode of food production expanded from its heartlands on the Orinoco and Rio Negro, tracking river systems through the rainforest, and ultimately becoming established all the way from Bolivia to the Antilles. Its legacy is clearest in the distribution of living and historical groups speaking languages of the Arawak family.41
亚马逊地区显示了这种 “进出农田” 的游戏可能远不止是一种短暂的事情。它似乎经历了几千年的时间,因为在那段时间里,有证据表明植物驯化和土地管理,但几乎没有对农业的承诺。40从公元前 500 年开始,这种新热带食物生产模式从奥利诺科河和内格罗河的中心地带扩展开来,沿着河流系统穿过雨林,最终从玻利维亚一直延伸到安的列斯群岛。它的遗产在讲阿拉瓦克家族语言的生活和历史群体的分布中体现得最为明显。41
Arawak-speaking groups were famed in recent centuries as master blenders of culture – traders and diplomats, forging diverse alliances, often for commercial advantage. Over 2,000 years ago, a similar process of strategic cultural mixing (quite unlike the avoidance strategies of more ‘serious’ farmers) seems to have brought about the convergence of the Amazon basin into a regional system. Arawak languages and their derivatives are spoken all along the várzea (alluvial terraces), from the mouths of the Orinoco and Amazon to their Peruvian headwaters. But their users have little in the way of shared genetic ancestry. The various dialects are structurally closer to those of their non-Arawak neighbours than to each other, or to any putative Ur- language.
讲阿拉瓦克语的群体在近几个世纪中被誉为文化混合大师 —— 商人和外交家,建立各种联盟,往往是为了商业利益。2000 多年前,一个类似的战略文化混合过程(与更 “严肃” 的农民的回避策略完全不同)似乎使亚马逊流域汇成了一个区域系统。从奥里诺科河和亚马逊河的河口到秘鲁的源头,沿河冲积梯田都有阿拉瓦克语言及其衍生物。但他们的使用者几乎没有共同的遗传血统。各种方言在结构上更接近于其非阿拉瓦克邻居的方言,而不是彼此之间,或任何假定的乌尔语。
The impression is not at all of a uniform spread, but a targeted interweaving of groups along the main routes of canoe-borne transport and trade. The result was an interlaced network of cultural exchange, lacking clear boundaries or a centre. The latticework schema on Amazonian pottery, cotton fabrics and skin painting – recurring in strikingly similar styles from one edge of the rainforest to the other – seem to model these connective principles, entangling human bodies in a complex cartography of relations.42
给人的印象根本不是统一的传播,而是沿着独木舟运输和贸易的主要路线有针对性地交织在一起的群体。其结果是一个交错的文化交流网络,缺乏明确的边界或中心。亚马逊陶器、棉织品和皮肤画上的格子图案 —— 从雨林的边缘到另一边缘,以惊人的相似风格反复出现 —— 似乎是这些连接原则的模型,将人类的身体纠缠在一个复杂的关系地图中。42
Until quite recently, Amazonia was regarded as a timeless refuge of solitary tribes, about as close to Rousseau or Hobbes’s State of Nature as one could possibly get. As we’ve seen, such romantic notions persisted in anthropology well into the 1980s, through studies that cast groups like the Yanomami in the role of ‘contemporary ancestors’, windows on to our evolutionary past. Research in the fields of archaeology and ethnohistory is now overturning this picture.
直到最近,亚马逊地区还被认为是一个孤独部落的永恒避难所,与卢梭或霍布斯的自然国度相差无几。正如我们所看到的,这种浪漫的观念在人类学中一直持续到 20 世纪 80 年代,通过研究,亚诺玛米人等群体被赋予了 “当代祖先” 的角色,成为我们进化史的窗口。考古学和民族史领域的研究现在正在颠覆这种情况。
We now know that, by the beginning of the Christian era, the Amazonian landscape was already studded with towns, terraces, monuments and roadways, reaching all the way from the highland kingdoms of Peru to the Caribbean. The first Europeans to arrive there in the sixteenth century described lively floodplain settlements governed by paramount chiefs who dominated their neighbours. It is tempting to dismiss these accounts as adventurers’ hyperbole, designed to impress the sponsors at home – but, as archaeological science brings the outlines of this rainforest civilization into view, it is increasingly difficult to do so. Partly this new understanding is the result of controlled research; partly a consequence of industrial deforestation, which in the Upper Amazon basin (looking west to the Andes) has exposed from the canopy a tradition of monumental earthworks, executed to precise geometrical plans and linked by road systems.43
我们现在知道,在基督教时代开始时,亚马逊地区已经布满了城镇、梯田、纪念碑和道路,从秘鲁的高原王国一直延伸到加勒比海。十六世纪第一批到达那里的欧洲人描述了生动的洪泛平原定居点,这些定居点由主宰其邻居的最高酋长管理。 人们很想把这些描述当作冒险家的夸张,旨在给国内的赞助者留下深刻印象 —— 但是,随着考古学将这种雨林文明的轮廓带入视野,这样做就越来越困难。这种新的理解部分是受控研究的结果;部分是工业化森林砍伐的结果,在上亚马逊流域(向西看是安第斯山脉),从树冠上露出了传统的纪念性土建筑,按照精确的几何计划执行,并由道路系统连接。43
What exactly was the reason for this ancient Amazonian efflorescence? Up until a few decades ago, all these developments were explained as the result of yet another ‘Agricultural Revolution’. It was supposed that, in the first millennium BC, intensified manioc-farming raised Amazonian population levels, generating a wave of human expansion throughout the lowland tropics. The basis for this hypothesis lay in finds of domesticated manioc, dating back as early as 7000 BC ; more recently, in southern Amazonia, the cultivation of maize and squash has been traced back to similarly early periods.44 Yet there is little evidence for widespread farming of these crops in the key period of cultural convergence, beginning around 500 BC. In fact, manioc only seems to have become a staple crop after European contact. All this implies that at least some early inhabitants of Amazonia were well aware of plant domestication but did not select it as the basis of their economy, opting instead for a more flexible kind of agroforestry.45
这种古老的亚马逊式的流变究竟是什么原因?直到几十年前,所有这些发展都被解释为又一次 “农业革命” 的结果。人们认为,在公元前一千年,强化的木薯种植提高了亚马逊的人口水平,在整个低地热带地区产生了一波人类扩张。这一假设的基础在于发现了驯化的木薯,最早可以追溯到公元前 7000 年;最近,在亚马逊南部,玉米和南瓜的种植也被追溯到类似的早期时期。44然而,在文化融合的关键时期,即公元前 500 年左右开始,几乎没有证据表明这些作物得到了广泛的种植。事实上,木薯似乎只是在与欧洲人接触后才成为一种主食作物。所有这些都意味着,至少亚马逊地区的一些早期居民非常了解植物的驯化,但并没有选择它作为他们经济的基础,而是选择了一种更灵活的农林业。45
Modern rainforest agriculture relies on slash-and-burn techniques, labour-intensive methods geared to the extensive cultivation of a small number of crops. The more ancient mode, which we’ve been describing, allowed for a much wider range of cultivars, grown in doorstep gardens or small forest clearings close to settlements. Such ancient plant nurseries rested on special soils (or, more strictly, ‘anthrosols’), which are locally called terra preta de índio (‘black earth of the Indians’) and terra mulata (‘brown earth’): dark earths with carrying capacities well in excess of ordinary tropical soils. The dark earths owe their fertility to absorption of organic by-products such as food residues, excrement and charcoal from everyday village life (forming terras pretas) and/or earlier episodes of localized burning and cultivation (terras mulatas) .46 Soil enrichment in ancient Amazonia was a slow and ongoing process, not an annual task.
现代雨林农业依赖于刀耕火种的技术,这种劳动密集型的方法适用于少量作物的广泛种植。我们一直在描述的更古老的模式,允许更广泛的栽培品种,在门前花园或靠近定居点的小型森林空地上种植。这种古老的植物苗圃依赖于特殊的土壤(或更严格地说,“anthrosols”),这些土壤在当地被称为terra preta de índio(“印第安人的黑土”)和terra mulata(“棕土”):黑土的承载能力远远超过普通热带土壤。黑土的肥力归功于对有机副产品的吸收,如食物残渣、排泄物和村庄日常生活中的木炭(形成terras pretas)和/或早期的局部燃烧和耕种(terras mulatas)的事件。46古代亚马逊地区的土壤富集是一个缓慢而持续的过程,而不是每年的任务。
‘Play farming’ of this sort, in the Amazon as elsewhere, has had its recent advantages for indigenous peoples. Elaborate and unpredictable subsistence routines are an excellent deterrent against the colonial State: an ecology of freedom in the literal sense. It is difficult to tax and monitor a group that refuses to stay in one location, obtaining its livelihood without making long-term commitments to fixed resources, or growing much of its food invisibly underground (as with tubers and other root vegetables).47 While this may be so, the deeper history of the American tropics shows that similarly loose and flexible patterns of food production sustained civilizational growth on a continent-wide scale, long before Europeans arrived.
在亚马逊和其他地方,这种 “游戏耕作” 对原住民有其,最近的优势。精心设计的、不可预测的生存方式是对殖民国家的一种很好的威慑:从字面上看是一种自由的生态。很难对一个拒绝呆在一个地方的群体进行征税和监督,他们在不对固定资源作出长期承诺的情况下获得生计,或者在地下隐蔽地种植大部分食物(如块茎和其他根茎类蔬菜)。47虽然情况可能如此,但美洲热带地区更深层的历史表明,类似的松散和灵活的食物生产模式在欧洲人到来之前,就已经在整个大陆范围内维持了文明的增长。
In fact, farming of this particular sort (‘low-level food production’ is the more technical term) has characterized a very wide range of Holocene societies, including the earliest cultivators of the Fertile Crescent and Mesoamerica.48 In Mexico, domestic forms of squash and maize existed by 7000 BC .49 Yet these crops only became staple foods around 5,000 years later. Similarly, in the Eastern Woodlands of North America local seed crops were cultivated by 3000 BC, but there was no ‘serious farming’ until around AD 1000.50 China follows a similar pattern. Millet-farming began on a small scale around 8000 BC, on the northern plains, as a seasonal complement to foraging and dog-assisted hunting. It remained so for 3,000 years, until the introduction of cultivated millets into the basin of the Yellow River. Similarly, on the lower and middle reaches of the Yangtze, fully domesticated rice strains only appear fifteen centuries after the first cultivation of wild rice in paddy fields. It might have even taken longer were it not for a snap of global cooling around 5000 BC, which depleted wild rice stands and nut harvests.51
事实上,这种特殊的耕作(“低水平的食物生产” 是更专业的术语)已经成为广泛的全新世社会的特征,包括新月沃土和中美洲的最早的耕作者。48在墨西哥,公元前 7000 年就已经有了家用的南瓜和玉米。49然而,这些作物在大约 5000 年后才成为主食。同样,在北美洲的东部林地,公元前 3000 年就开始种植当地的种子作物,但直到公元 1000 年左右才有 “真正的农业”。50中国也有类似的模式。公元前 8000 年左右,在北方平原,小米种植开始小规模地进行,作为觅食和狗辅助狩猎的一种季节性补充。这种情况持续了 3000 年,直到栽培的小米被引入黄河流域。同样,在长江中下游地区,完全驯化的水稻品系是在水田首次种植野生稻之后 15 个世纪才出现的。如果不是因为公元前 5000 年左右的全球降温,使野生稻的数量和坚果的收成减少,甚至可能需要更长时间。51
In both parts of China, long after their domestication pigs still came second to wild boar and deer in terms of dietary significance. This was also the case in the wooded uplands of the Fertile Crescent, where Çayönü with its House of Skulls is located, and where human–pig relations long remained more a matter of flirtation than full domestication.52 So while it’s tempting to hold Amazonia up as a ‘New World’ alternative to the ‘Old World Neolithic’, the truth is that Holocene developments in both hemispheres are starting to look increasingly similar, at least in terms of the overall pace of change. And in both cases, they look increasingly un-revolutionary. In the beginning, many of the world’s farming societies were Amazonian in spirit. They hovered at the threshold of agriculture while remaining wedded to the cultural values of hunting and foraging. The ‘smiling fields’ of Rousseau’s Discourse still lay far off in the future.
在中国的这两个地区,在猪被驯化后的很长一段时间里,猪在饮食上的重要性仍然次于野猪和鹿。在新月沃土的森林高地也是如此,恰尤努和它的骷髅屋就位于那里,在那里,人与猪的关系长期以来更多的是一种调情,而不是完全的驯化。52因此,虽然我们很想把亚马逊地区作为 “新世界” 来替代 “旧世界新石器时代”,但事实是,两个半球的全新世发展开始变得越来越相似,至少在整体变化的速度上是这样。而且在这两种情况下,它们看起来越来越不革命。起初,世界上许多的农业社会在精神上是亚马逊的。他们徘徊在农业的门槛上,同时仍然坚持狩猎和觅食的文化价值。卢梭《不平等论》中的 “微笑的田野” 仍在未来的远处。
It may be that further research reveals demographic fluctuations among early farming (or forester-farmer) populations in Amazonia, Oceania or even among the first herding peoples of the Nile valley, similar to those now observed for central Europe. Indeed, some sort of decline, or at least major reconfiguration of settlement, took place in the Fertile Crescent itself during the seventh millennium BC .53 At any rate, we shouldn’t be too categorical about the contrasts among these various regions, given the different amounts of evidence available for each. Still, based on what is currently known, we can at least reframe our initial question and ask: why did Neolithic farmers in certain parts of Europe initially suffer population collapse on a scale currently unknown, or undetected elsewhere?
进一步的研究可能会揭示出亚马逊、大洋洲甚至尼罗河流域第一批牧民中的早期农业(或林农)人口的人口波动,与现在观察到的中欧的人口波动相似。事实上,在公元前七千年期间,新月沃土本身也发生了某种衰退,或者至少是定居的重大重新配置。53无论如何,鉴于每个地区的证据数量不同,我们不应该对这些不同地区之间的对比过于绝对化。不过,根据目前已知的情况,我们至少可以重新规划我们最初的问题,并问:为什么欧洲某些地区的新石器时代农民最初遭受人口崩溃,其规模目前尚不清楚,或在其他地方未被发现?
Clues lie in the tiniest of details.
线索存在于最微小的细节中。
Cereal-farming, as it turns out, underwent some important changes during its transfer from Southwest Asia to central Europe via the Balkans. Originally there were three kinds of wheat (einkorn, emmer and free threshing) and two kinds of barley (hulled and naked) under cultivation, but also five different pulses (pea, lentil, bitter vetch, chickpea and grass pea). By contrast, the majority of Linear Pottery sites contain just glume wheats (emmer and einkorn) and one or two kinds of pulse. The Neolithic economy had become increasingly narrow and uniform, a diminished subset of the Middle Eastern original. Furthermore, the loess landscapes of central Europe offered little topographical variability and few opportunities to add new resources, while dense forager populations limited expansion towards the coasts.54
事实证明,谷物种植在从西南亚经巴尔干半岛转移到中欧期间经历了一些重要变化。最初有三种小麦(Einkorn、Emmer 和自由脱粒)和两种大麦(去壳和裸麦)的种植,但也有五种不同的豆类(豌豆、扁豆、苦苣、鹰嘴豆和草豆)。相比之下,大多数线性陶器遗址只包含有颖壳小麦(埃默尔和埃克纳)和一两种脉冲。新石器时代的经济已经变得越来越狭窄和统一,是中东原始经济的一个缩小的子集。此外,欧洲中部的黄土地貌没有提供什么地形变化,也没有什么机会来增加新的资源,而密集的觅食者人口限制了向沿海地区的扩张。54
Almost everything came to revolve around a single food web for Europe’s earliest farmers. Cereal-farming fed the community. Its by-products – chaff and straw – provided fuel, fodder for their animals, as well as basic materials for construction, including temper for pottery and daub for houses. Livestock supplied occasional meat, dairy and wool, as well as manure for gardens.55 With their wattle-and-daub longhouses and sparse material culture, these first European farming settlements bear a peculiar resemblance to the rural peasant societies of much later eras. Most likely, they were also subject to some of the same weaknesses – not just periodic raiding from the outside, but also internal labour crunches, soil exhaustion, disease and harvest failures across a whole string of like-for-like communities, with little scope for mutual aid.
对于欧洲最早的农民来说,几乎所有的事情都是围绕着一个单一的食物网进行的。谷物种植养活了整个社区。谷物的副产品 —— 糠和稻草 —— 为他们的动物提供燃料和饲料,以及基本的建筑材料,包括陶器的钢筋和房屋的毛坯。牲畜偶尔提供肉类、奶类和羊毛,以及花园的粪便。55这些最早的欧洲农业定居点以其瓦片和稻草长屋和稀少的物质文化,与后来的农村农民社会有着特殊的相似之处。他们很可能也有一些相同的弱点 —— 不仅仅是来自外部的定期袭击,还有内部的劳动力短缺、土壤枯竭、疾病和整个类似社区的歉收,几乎没有互助的空间。
Neolithic farming was an experiment that could fail – and, on occasion, did.
新石器时代的农业是一种可能失败的实验 —— 而且有时确实如此。
In this chapter we have tracked the fate of some of the world’s first farmers as they hopped, stumbled and bluffed their way around the globe, with mixed success. But what does this tell us about the overall course of human history? Surely, the sceptical reader might object, what matters in the wider scheme of things are not the first faltering steps towards agriculture, but its long-term effects. After all, by no later than 2000 BC agriculture was supporting great cities, from China to the Mediterranean; and by 500 BC food-producing societies of one sort or another had colonized pretty much all of Eurasia, with the exception of southern Africa, the sub-Arctic region and a handful of subtropical islands.
在这一章中,我们追踪了一些世界上最早的农民的命运,他们在全球范围内跳来跳去,跌跌撞撞,虚张声势,取得了不同的成功。但这对人类历史的整体进程有什么启示呢?当然,持怀疑态度的读者可能会反对,在更广泛的计划中,重要的不是迈向农业的第一个蹒跚步骤,而是其长期影响。毕竟,不迟于公元前 2000 年,从中国到地中海,农业已经支持了伟大的城市;到公元前 500 年,除了非洲南部、亚北极地区和少数亚热带岛屿之外,几乎所有的欧亚大陆都有这样或那样的粮食生产社会在殖民。
A sceptic might continue: agriculture alone could unlock the carrying capacity of lands that foragers were either unable or unwilling to exploit to anything like the same degree. So long as people were willing to give up their mobility and settle, even small parcels of arable soil could be made to yield food surpluses, especially once ploughs and irrigation were introduced. Even if there were temporary downturns, or even catastrophic failures, over the long term the odds were surely always stacked in favour of those who could intensify land use to sustain ever larger and denser populations. And let’s face it, the same sceptic might conclude, the world’s population could only grow from perhaps 5 million at the start of the Holocene to 900 million by AD 1800, and now to billions, because of agriculture.
怀疑者可能会继续说:农业本身可以释放土地的承载能力,而觅食者要么不能要么不愿意以同样的程度来开发土地。只要人们愿意放弃他们的流动性和定居,即使是小块的可耕地也可以产生粮食盈余,特别是一旦引入了犁和灌溉。即使有暂时的衰退,甚至是灾难性的失败,从长远来看,机会肯定总是有利于那些能够加强土地利用以维持越来越多和越来越密集的人口的人。 让我们面对现实吧,同样的怀疑论者可能会得出结论,世界人口只能从全新世开始时的 500 万增长到公元 1800 年的 9 亿,现在又增长到数十亿,这是因为农业。
How too, for that matter, could such large populations be fed, without chains of command to organize the masses, formal offices of leadership; full-time administrators, soldiers, police, and other non-food-producers, who in turn could only be supported by the surpluses that agriculture provides? These seem like reasonable questions to ask, and those who make the first point almost invariably make the second. But in doing so, they risk parting company with history. You can’t simply jump from the beginning of the story to the end, and then just assume you know what happened in the middle. Well, you can, but then you are slipping back into the very fairy tales we’ve been dealing with throughout this book. So instead, let’s recap very briefly what we’ve learned about the origins and spread of farming, and then turn to examine some of the more dramatic things that actually did happen to human societies over the last 5,000 or so years.
如果没有指挥系统来组织群众,没有正式的领导机构,没有全职的行政人员、士兵、警察和其他非粮食生产者,而这些人又只能靠农业提供的盈余来养活,又如何能养活这么多的人口?这些问题似乎很合理,那些提出第一点的人几乎都会提出第二点。但在这样做时,他们有可能与历史分道扬镳。你不能简单地从故事的开头跳到结尾,然后就假设你知道中间发生了什么。好吧,你可以,但那样你就又回到了我们在本书中一直在处理的童话故事中。因此,让我们简单回顾一下我们所学到的关于农耕的起源和传播的知识,然后再来研究在过去 5000 年左右的时间里,人类社会确实发生了一些更戏剧性的事情。
Farming, as we can now see, often started out as an economy of deprivation: you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done, which is why it tended to happen first in areas where wild resources were thinnest on the ground. It was the odd one out in the strategies of the Early Holocene, but it had explosive growth potential, especially after domestic livestock were added to cereal crops. Even so, it was the new kid on the block. Since the first farmers made more rubbish, and often built houses of baked mud, they are also more visible to archaeologists. That’s one reason why imaginative in-filling is necessary if we want to avoid missing the action going on in much richer environments at the same time, among populations still largely reliant on wild resources.
正如我们现在所看到的,农业往往是作为一种匮乏的经济开始的:你只有在没有其他事情可做的时候才会发明它,这就是为什么它往往首先发生在地面上野生资源最稀少的地方。在早期全新世的战略中,它是一个怪胎,但它有爆炸性的增长潜力,特别是在家畜加入谷物作物之后。即便如此,它也是一个新的孩子。由于第一批农民制造了更多的垃圾,而且经常用烤泥建造房屋,所以他们也更容易被考古学家看到。这就是为什么如果我们想避免错过同时在更丰富的环境中发生的行动,在仍然主要依赖野生资源的人口中,有必要进行富有想象力的填充的一个原因。
Seasonally erected monuments like those of Göbekli Tepe or Lake Shigirskoe are as clear a signal as one could wish for that big things were afoot among Holocene hunter-fisher-gatherers. But what were all the non-farming people doing, and where were they living, for the rest of the time? Upland forested areas, like the uplands of eastern Turkey or the foothills of the Urals, are one candidate, but since most construction was in wood, very little of this habitation survives. Most likely, the largest communities were concentrated around lakes, rivers and coastlands, and especially at their junctures: delta environments – such as those of southern Mesopotamia, the lower reaches of the Nile and the Indus – where many of the world’s first cities arose, and to which we must now turn in order to find out exactly what living in large and densely populated settlements really did (and did not) imply for the development of human societies.
像 Göbekli Tepe 或 Shigirskoe 湖这样的季节性竖立的纪念碑是一个清晰的信号,表明在全新世的狩猎者·渔民·采集者之间正在进行着大事情。但是,在剩下的时间里,所有非农耕者都在做什么,他们在哪里生活?高原森林地区,如土耳其东部的高地或乌拉尔山麓,是一个候选地点,但由于大多数建筑是用木头做的,这种居住环境很少被保存下来。最有可能的是,最大的社区集中在湖泊、河流和海岸线周围,特别是在它们的交界处:三角洲环境 —— 如美索不达米亚南部、尼罗河和印度河下游 —— 世界上许多最早的城市都是在这里产生的,我们现在必须转向这些地方,以找出生活在大型和人口密集的定居点对人类社会的发展到底意味着什么(或没有)。
欧亚大陆最早的城市人 —— 在美索不达米亚、印度河流域、乌克兰和中国 —— 以及他们如何在没有国王的情况下建造城市
Cities begin in the mind.
城市始于心灵。
Or so proposed Elias Canetti, a novelist and social philosopher often written off as one of those offbeat mid-century central European thinkers no one knows quite what to do with. Canetti speculated that Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers living in small communities must, inevitably, have spent time wondering what larger ones would be like. Proof, he felt, was on the walls of caves, where they faithfully depicted herd animals that moved together in uncountable masses. How could they not have wondered what human herds might be like, in all their terrible glory? No doubt they also considered the dead, outnumbering the living by orders of magnitude. What if everyone who’d ever died were all in one place? What would that be like? These ‘invisible crowds’, Canetti proposed, were in a sense the first human cities, even if they existed only in the imagination.
埃利亚斯·卡内蒂是一位小说家和社会哲学家,他经常被写成那些古怪的世纪中期中欧思想家之一,没有人知道该怎么做。卡内蒂推测,生活在小社区的旧石器时代的狩猎采集者,不可避免地会花时间思考更大的社区会是什么样子。他认为,证据就在山洞的墙壁上,在那里他们忠实地描绘了群居动物,这些动物以难以计数的数量一起移动。他们怎么能不想知道人类的群落会是什么样子,在所有可怕的荣耀中?毫无疑问,他们也考虑到了死人,他们的人数比活人多出好几个数量级。如果所有死过的人都在一个地方呢?那会是什么样子?卡内蒂提出,这些 “看不见的人群” 在某种意义上是人类最早的城市,即使它们只存在于想象中。
All this might seem idle speculation (in fact, speculation about speculation), but current advances in the study of human cognition suggest that Canetti had put his finger on something important, something almost everyone else had overlooked. Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, or at least most of the time, in our heads. Much of social theory can be seen as an attempt to square these two dimensions of our experience.
所有这些可能看起来都是空穴来风(事实上,是对推测的推测),但目前人类认知研究的进展表明,卡内蒂已经把他的手指放在了一些重要的东西上,一些几乎其他人都忽略了的东西。从某种意义上说,非常大的社会单位始终是想象的。或者,换个说法:在人与朋友、家人、邻里、我们实际直接了解的人和地方的关系,与人与帝国、国家和大都市的关系之间,总是存在着一个基本的区别,这些现象在很大程度上,或者至少在大多数时间里,存在于我们的头脑中。许多社会理论可以被看作是对我们经验的这两个层面的一种尝试。
In the standard, textbook version of human history, scale is crucial. The tiny bands of foragers in which humans were thought to have spent most of their evolutionary history could be relatively democratic and egalitarian precisely because they were small. It’s common to assume – and is often stated as self-evident fact – that our social sensibilities, even our capacity to keep track of names and faces, are largely determined by the fact that we spent 95 per cent of our evolutionary history in tiny groups of at best a few dozen individuals. We’re designed to work in small teams. As a result, large agglomerations of people are often treated as if they were by definition somewhat unnatural, and humans as psychologically ill equipped to handle life inside them. This is the reason, the argument often goes, that we require such elaborate ‘scaffolding’ to make larger communities work: such things as urban planners, social workers, tax auditors and police.1
在人类历史的标准、教科书版本中,规模是关键。人类被认为在其进化史上大部分时间都是在微小的觅食者队伍中度过的,正是因为他们小,所以才会相对民主和平等。人们普遍认为 —— 而且经常被说成是不言而喻的事实 —— 我们的社会感觉,甚至我们记住名字和面孔的能力,在很大程度上是由以下事实决定的:我们在进化史上 95% 的时间是在最多几十个人的小团体中度过的。我们被设计为在小团队中工作。因此,人们常常把大的人群聚集在一起,好像他们的定义有点不自然,而人类在心理上也没有能力处理其中的生活。这就是为什么我们需要如此精心设计的 “脚手架” 来使更大的社区运作:如城市规划师、社会工作者、税务审计师和警察。1
If so, it would make perfect sense that the appearance of the first cities, the first truly large concentrations of people permanently settled in one place, would also correspond to the rise of states. For a long time, the archaeological evidence – from Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Central America and elsewhere – did appear to confirm this. If you put enough people in one place, the evidence seemed to show, they would almost inevitably develop writing or something like it, together with administrators, storage and redistribution facilities, workshops and overseers. Before long, they would also start dividing themselves into social classes. ‘Civilization’ came as a package. It meant misery and suffering for some (since some would inevitably be reduced to serfs, slaves or debt peons), but also allowed for the possibility of philosophy, art and the accumulation of scientific knowledge.
如果是这样的话,那么第一批城市的出现,即第一批真正意义上的大量人口永久定居在一个地方,也会与国家的兴起相对应,这就非常合理了。在很长一段时间里,来自埃及、美索不达米亚、中国、中美洲和其他地方的考古学证据似乎证实了这一点。证据似乎表明,如果你把足够多的人放在一个地方,他们几乎不可避免地会发展出文字或类似的东西,还有行政人员、储存和再分配设施、工场和监督员。不久之后,他们也会开始将自己划分为社会阶层。“文明” 是一个整体。它意味着一些人的不幸和痛苦(因为一些人将不可避免地沦为农奴、奴隶或债务人),但也允许哲学、艺术和科学知识的积累的可能性。
The evidence no longer suggests anything of the sort. In fact, much of what we have come to learn in the last forty or fifty years has thrown conventional wisdom into disarray. In some regions, we now know, cities governed themselves for centuries without any sign of the temples and palaces that would only emerge later; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all. In many early cities, there is simply no evidence of either a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum. In others, centralized power seems to appear and then disappear. It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did.
证据不再表明有这样的事情发生。事实上,我们在过去四、五十年里所了解到的许多情况都使传统智慧陷入混乱。我们现在知道,在一些地区,城市自我管理了几个世纪,没有任何后来才出现的寺庙和宫殿的迹象;在其他地区,寺庙和宫殿根本就没有出现过。在许多早期城市中,根本没有证据表明有行政人员或任何其他类型的统治阶层。在其他城市,集中的权力似乎出现了,然后又消失了。看来,城市生活的事实并不意味着任何特定的政治组织形式,而且从来没有。
This has all sorts of important implications: for one thing, it suggests a much less pessimistic assessment of human possibilities, since the mere fact that much of the world’s population now live in cities may not determine how we live, to anything like the extent you might assume – but before even starting to think about that, we need to ask how we got things so extraordinarily wrong to begin with.
这具有各种重要的意义:首先,它表明对人类可能性的评估不那么悲观,因为仅仅是世界上大部分人口现在生活在城市这一事实,可能并不决定我们的生活方式,以至于你可能认为的程度 —— 但在开始思考这个问题之前,我们需要问,我们是如何开始把事情弄得如此异常糟糕的。
‘Common sense’ is a peculiar expression. Sometimes it means exactly what it seems to mean: practical wisdom born of real-life experience, avoiding stupid, obvious pitfalls. This is what we mean when we say that a cartoon villain who puts a clearly marked ‘self-destruct’ button on his doomsday device, or who fails to block the ventilation passages in his secret headquarters, is lacking common sense. On the other hand, it occasionally turns out that things which seem like simple common sense are, in fact, not.
“常识” 是一个奇特的表达。有时它的意思正是它看起来的意思:源于现实生活经验的实用智慧,避免愚蠢、明显的陷阱。这就是我们所说的,一个在其末日装置上明确标明 “自毁” 按钮的卡通反派,或未能封锁其秘密总部的通风通道的人,是缺乏常识的。另一方面,偶尔也会发现,那些看似简单的常识,其实并不简单。
For a long time, it was considered almost universal common sense that women make poor soldiers. After all, it was noted, women tend to be smaller and have less upper-body strength. Then various military forces made the experiment and discovered that women also tend to be much better shots. Similarly, it is almost universal common sense that it’s relatively easy for a small group to treat each other as equals and come to decisions democratically, but that the larger the number of people involved, the more difficult this becomes. If you think about it, this isn’t really as commonsensical as it seems, since it clearly isn’t true of groups that endure. Over time, any group of intimate friends, let alone a family, will eventually develop a complicated history that makes coming to agreement on almost anything difficult; whereas the larger the group, the less likely it is to contain a significant proportion of people you specifically detest. But for various reasons, the problem of scale has now become a matter of simple common sense not only to scholars, but to almost everyone else.
很长时间以来,人们认为妇女是不合格的士兵,这几乎是普遍的常识。毕竟,人们注意到,妇女往往身材较小,上肢力量较小。然后,各种军事力量进行了实验,发现妇女也往往是更好的射手。同样,几乎普遍的常识是,对于一个小团体来说,彼此平等相待并以民主方式作出决定是相对容易的,但参与人数越多,这就变得越困难。如果你仔细想想,这其实并不像它看起来那样符合常识,因为它显然不适合于那些持久的群体。随着时间的推移,任何一群亲密的朋友,更不用说一个家庭,最终都会形成复杂的历史,使得在几乎任何事情上达成一致都很困难;而群体越大,就越不可能包含相当一部分你特别讨厌的人。但由于各种原因,规模问题现在不仅对学者,而且对几乎所有其他人来说,都已经成为一个简单的常识问题。
Since the problem is typically seen as a result of our evolutionary inheritance, it might be helpful for a moment to return to the source and consider how evolutionary psychologists like Robin Dunbar have typically framed the question. Most begin by observing that the social organization of hunter-gatherers – both ancient and modern – operates at different tiers or levels, ‘nested’ inside one another like Russian dolls. The most basic social unit is the pair-bonded family, with shared investment in offspring. To provide for themselves and dependants, these nuclear units are obliged (or so the argument goes) to cluster together in ‘bands’ made up of five or six closely related families. On ritual occasions, or when game is particularly abundant, such bands coalesce to form ‘residential groups’ (or ‘clans’) of roughly 150 persons, which – according to Dunbar – is also around the upper limit of stable, trusting relationships we are cognitively able to keep track of in our heads. And this, he suggests, is no coincidence. Beyond 150 (which has come to be known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’) larger groups such as ‘tribes’ may form – but, Dunbar asserts, these larger groups will inevitably lack the solidarity of smaller, kin-based ones, and so conflicts will tend to arise within them.2
由于这个问题通常被看作是我们进化遗传的结果,因此,我们不妨回到源头,考虑一下像罗宾·邓巴这样的进化心理学家通常是如何提出这个问题的。大多数人首先观察到,狩猎采集者的社会组织 —— 无论是古代还是现代 —— 在不同的层级或水平上运作,像俄罗斯娃娃一样相互 “嵌套”。最基本的社会单位是一对一的家庭,对后代有共同的投资。为了养活自己和受抚养人,这些核心单位不得不(或者说是这样的说法)聚集在一起,组成由五个或六个密切相关的家庭组成的 “族群”。在仪式上,或者当猎物特别多的时候,这些带子会凝聚成大约 150 人的 “住宅群”(或 “氏族”),根据邓巴的说法,这也是我们在认知上能够记录的稳定、信任的关系的上限。他认为,这并不是巧合。超过 150 人(这已被称为 “邓巴数字”),可能会形成更大的群体,如 “部落” —— 但是,邓巴断言,这些更大的群体将不可避免地缺乏较小的、基于亲属的群体的团结,因此冲突将倾向于在其中出现。2
Dunbar considers such ‘nested’ arrangements to be among the factors which shaped human cognition in deep evolutionary time, such that even today a whole plethora of institutions that require high levels of social commitment, from military brigades to church congregations, still tend to gravitate around the original figure of 150 relationships. It’s a fascinating hypothesis. As formulated by evolutionary psychologists, it hinges on the idea that living hunter-gatherers do actually provide evidence for this supposedly ancient way of scaling social relationships upwards from core family units to bands and residential groups, with each larger group reproducing that same sense of loyalty to one’s natal kin, just on a greater scale, all the way up to things like ‘brothers’ – or indeed ‘sisters’ – in arms. But here comes the worm in the bud.
邓巴认为这种 “嵌套” 安排是在深层进化中塑造人类认知的因素之一,因此即使在今天,从军队到教堂会众,需要高度社会承诺的大量机构仍然倾向于围绕 150 种关系的原始数字。这是一个迷人的假说。正如进化心理学家所提出的那样,它依赖于这样一种观点:活着的狩猎采集者实际上提供了证据,证明了这种所谓的古代社会关系向上扩展的方式,从核心的家庭单位到族群和住宅群,每个更大的群体都再现了对一个人的亲属的同样的忠诚感,只是规模更大,一直到像 “兄弟” —— 或者确实是 “姐妹” —— 这样的事情。但是,这里的虫子在萌芽中出现了。
There is an obvious objection to evolutionary models which assume that our strongest social ties are based on close biological kinship: many humans just don’t like their families very much. And this appears to be just as true of present-day hunter-gatherers as anybody else. Many seem to find the prospect of living their entire lives surrounded by close relatives so unpleasant that they will travel very long distances just to get away from them. New work on the demography of modern hunter-gatherers – drawing statistical comparisons from a global sample of cases, ranging from the Hadza in Tanzania to the Australian Martu3 – shows that residential groups turn out not to be made up of biological kin at all; and the burgeoning field of human genomics is beginning to suggest a similar picture for ancient hunter-gatherers as well, all the way back to the Pleistocene.4
对于那些假定我们最牢固的社会关系是基于紧密的生物亲属关系的进化模型,有一个明显的反对意见:许多人就是不太喜欢他们的家庭。现今的狩猎·采集者和其他人一样,似乎也是如此。许多人似乎发现在近亲的包围中度过一生的前景,以至于他们会走很远的路,只是为了离开他们。关于现代狩猎采集者的人口统计学的新工作 —— 从全球样本中进行统计比较,从坦桑尼亚的哈德扎人到澳大利亚的马尔图人3 —— 显示,居住群体根本不是由生物亲属组成的;而新兴的人类基因组学领域也开始显示出古代狩猎采集者的类似情况,一直追溯到更新世。4
While modern Martu, for instance, might speak of themselves as if they were all descended from some common totemic ancestor, it turns out that primary biological kin actually make up less than 10 per cent of the total membership of any given residential group. Most participants are drawn from a much wider pool who do not share close genetic relationships, whose origins are scattered over very large territories, and who may not even have grown up speaking the same languages. Anyone recognized to be Martu is a potential member of any Martu band, and the same turns out to be true of the Hadza, BaYaka,!Kung San, and so on. The truly adventurous, meanwhile, can often contrive to abandon their own larger group entirely. This is all the more surprising in places like Australia, where there tend to be very elaborate kinship systems in which almost all social arrangements are ostensibly organized around genealogical descent from totemic ancestors.
例如,虽然现代的马尔图人可能会把自己说成是某个共同的图腾祖先的后裔,但事实证明,主要的生物亲属实际上只占任何特定居住群体总成员的不到 10%。大多数参与者来自一个更广泛的群体,他们没有密切的遗传关系,他们的起源分散在非常大的领土上,甚至可能没有说同样的语言长大。任何被确认为马尔图人的人都可能是任何马尔图族群的成员,哈德萨人、巴亚卡人、孔山人等也是如此。同时,真正具有冒险精神的人往往可以设法完全放弃自己的大团体。在澳大利亚这样的地方,这就更令人惊讶了,那里往往有非常复杂的亲属关系系统,几乎所有的社会安排表面上都是围绕图腾祖先的谱系血统来组织的。
It would seem, then, that kinship in such cases is really a kind of metaphor for social attachments, in much the same way we’d say ‘all men are brothers’ when trying to express internationalism (even if we can’t stand our actual brother and haven’t spoken to him for years). What’s more, the shared metaphor often extended over very long distances, as we’ve seen with the way that Turtle or Bear clans once existed across North America, or moiety systems across Australia. This made it a relatively simple matter for anyone disenchanted with their immediate biological kin to travel very long distances and still find a welcome.
那么,在这种情况下,亲属关系似乎真的是一种社会依恋的隐喻,就像我们在试图表达国际主义时说 “所有的人都是兄弟” 一样(即使我们无法忍受我们真正的兄弟,并且已经多年没有和他说话)。更重要的是,共同的隐喻往往延伸到很远的地方,正如我们看到的那样,海龟或熊族曾经存在于整个北美洲,或者澳大利亚的 moiety 系统。这使得任何对自己的直系亲属不满意的人都能在很远的地方找到欢迎他们的人,这是一件相对简单的事情。
It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents. This might seem odd, but from the perspective of cognitive science it makes perfect sense. It’s precisely this capacity to shift between scales that most obviously separates human social cognition from that of other primates.5 Apes may vie for affection or dominance, but any victory is temporary and open to being renegotiated. Nothing is imagined as eternal. Nothing is really imagined at all. Humans tend to live simultaneously with the 150-odd people they know personally, and inside imaginary structures shared by perhaps millions or even billions of other humans. Sometimes, as in the case of modern nations, these are imagined as being based on kin ties; sometimes they are not.6
就好像现代觅食者社会同时存在于两种截然不同的尺度上:一种是小而亲密的,另一种是跨越广阔的领土,甚至是大陆。这可能看起来很奇怪,但从认知科学的角度来看,这是很合理的。恰恰是,这种在不同规模之间转换的能力最明显地将人类的社会认知与其他灵长类动物的社会认知分开。5猿猴可能会争夺感情或主导权,但任何胜利都是暂时的,而且可以重新谈判。没有什么是被想象成永恒的。没有什么是真正想象出来的。人类倾向于同时与他们个人认识的 150 多人生活在一起,并生活在可能由数百万甚至数十亿其他人类共享的想象的结构中。有时,就像现代国家的情况一样,这些结构被想象为基于亲属关系;有时却不是。6
In this, at least, modern foragers are no different from modern city dwellers or ancient hunter-gatherers. We all have the capacity to feel bound to people we will probably never meet; to take part in a macro-society which exists most of the time as ‘virtual reality’, a world of possible relationships with its own rules, roles and structures that are held in the mind and recalled through the cognitive work of image-making and ritual. Foragers may sometimes exist in small groups, but they do not – and probably have not ever – lived in small-scale societies .7
至少在这一点上,现代觅食者与现代城市居民或古代狩猎采集者没有什么不同。我们都有能力感觉到与我们可能永远不会遇到的人的联系;参加一个宏观社会,而这个社会在大多数时候是作为 “虚拟现实” 存在的,是一个有自己的规则、角色和结构的可能关系的世界,它被保存在头脑中,并通过图像制作和仪式的认知工作而被回忆。觅食者有时可能存在于小群体中,但他们并没有 —— 而且可能从来没有 —— 生活在小规模的社会中。7
None of which is to say that scale – in the sense of absolute population size – makes no difference at all. What it means is that these things do not necessarily matter in the seemingly common-sense sort of way we tend to assume. On this particular point, at least, Canetti had it right. Mass society exists in the mind before it becomes physical reality. And crucially, it also exists in the mind after it becomes physical reality.
这并不是说,规模 —— 在绝对人口规模的意义上 —— 完全没有区别。它的意思是,这些东西不一定以我们倾向于假设的那种看似常识性的方式重要。至少在这一点上,卡内蒂是正确的。大众社会在成为物理现实之前就存在于人们的头脑中。关键是,它也存在于它成为物理现实之后的头脑中。
At this point we can return to cities.
在这一点上,我们可以回到城市。
Cities are tangible things. Certain elements of their physical infrastructure – walls, roads, parks, sewers – might remain fixed for hundreds or even thousands of years; but in human terms they are never stable. People are constantly moving in and out of them, whether permanently, or seasonally for holidays and festivals, to visit relatives, trade, raid, tour around, and so on; or just in the course of their daily rounds. Yet cities have a life that transcends all this. This is not because of the permanence of stone or brick or adobe; neither is it because most people in a city actually meet one another. It is because they will often think and act as people who belong to the city – as Londoners or Muscovites or Calcuttans. As the urban sociologist Claude Fischer put it:
城市是有形的东西。其物质基础设施的某些元素 —— 墙壁、道路、公园、下水道 —— 可能会在几百年甚至几千年内保持固定;但就人类而言,它们永远不会稳定。人们不断地进出城市,无论是永久的,还是季节性的,为了假期和节日,为了探亲,为了贸易,为了突击检查,为了旅游,等等;或者只是在他们的日常巡视过程中。然而,城市有一种超越这一切的生活。这并不是因为石头、砖头或土坯的永久性;也不是因为城市中的大多数人实际上是相互见面的。这是因为他们经常像属于城市的人一样思考或行动,就好像伦敦人或莫斯科人或加尔各答人那样。正如城市社会学家克劳德·费舍尔所说:
Most city dwellers lead sensible, circumscribed lives, rarely go downtown, hardly know areas of the city they neither live nor work in, and see (in any sociologically meaningful way) only a tiny fraction of the city’s population. Certainly, they may on occasion – during rush hours, football games, etc. – be in the presence of thousands of strangers, but that does not necessarily have any direct effect on their personal lives … urbanites live in small social worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate.8
大多数城市居民的生活是合理的、有限制的,他们很少去市中心,几乎不了解他们既不生活也不工作的城市区域,而且(以任何有社会学意义的方式)只看到城市人口的一小部分。当然,他们可能偶尔 —— 在高峰期、足球比赛等场合 —— 与成千上万的陌生人在一起。当然,他们偶尔也会出现在成千上万的陌生人面前,但这并不一定会对他们的个人生活产生任何直接影响…… 城市人生活在小的社会世界里,这些世界相互接触但并不相互渗透。8
All this applies in equal measure to ancient cities. Aristotle, for example, insisted that Babylon was so large that, two or three days after it had been captured by a foreign army, some parts of the city still hadn’t heard the news. In other words, from the perspective of someone living in an ancient city, the city itself was not so entirely different from earlier landscapes of clans or moieties that extended across hundreds of miles. It was a structure raised primarily in the human imagination, which allowed for the possibility of amicable relations with people they had never met.
所有这些都同样适用于古代城市。例如,亚里士多德坚持认为巴比伦是如此之大,以至于在它被外国军队占领两三天后,城市的某些地方仍然没有听到这个消息。换句话说,从一个生活在古代城市的人的角度来看,城市本身并不完全不同于早期的宗族或部落的景观,这些景观延伸到数百英里之外。这是一个主要在人类想象中提出的结构,它允许与他们从未见过的人建立友好关系的可能性。
In Chapter Four we suggested that for much of human history, the geographical range in which most human beings were operating was actually shrinking. Palaeolithic ‘culture areas’ spanned continents. Mesolithic and Neolithic culture zones still covered much wider areas than the home territory of most contemporary ethno-linguistic groups (what anthropologists refer to as ‘cultures’). Cities were part of that process of contraction, since urbanites could, and many did, spend almost their entire lives within a few miles’ radius – something that would hardly have been conceivable for people of an earlier age. One way to think about this would be to imagine a vast regional system, of the kind that once spanned much of Australia or North America, being squeezed into a single urban space – while still maintaining its virtual quality. If that is even roughly what happened when the earliest cities formed, then there’s no reason to assume there were any special cognitive challenges involved. Living in unbounded, eternal, largely imaginary groups is effectively what humans had been doing all along.
在第四章中我们提出,在人类历史的大部分时间里,大多数人类活动的地理范围实际上是在缩小的。旧石器时代的 “文化区” 横跨各大洲。中石器时代和新石器时代的文化区仍然覆盖了比大多数当代民族语言群体(人类学家称之为 “文化”)的家乡更广阔的区域。城市是这种收缩过程的一部分,因为城市人可以,而且许多人确实在几英里的半径内度过他们的一生 —— 这对早期的人来说是难以想象的。思考这个问题的一种方式是想象一个巨大的区域系统,即曾经横跨澳大利亚或北美的那种,被挤压到一个单一的城市空间 —— 同时仍然保持其虚拟质量。如果这甚至是最早的城市形成时的大致情况,那么就没有理由假设有任何特殊的认知挑战。生活在无界限的、永恒的、主要是想象的群体中,实际上就是人类一直在做的事情。
So what was really new here? Let’s go back to the archaeological evidence. Settlements inhabited by tens of thousands of people make their first appearance in human history around 6000 years ago, on almost every continent, at first in isolation. Then they multiply. One of the things that makes it so difficult to fit what we now know about them into an old-fashioned evolutionary sequence, where cities, states, bureaucracies and social classes all emerge together,9 is just how different these cities are. It’s not just that some early cities lack class divisions, wealth monopolies, or hierarchies of administration. They exhibit such extreme variability as to imply, from the very beginning, a conscious experimentation in urban form.
那么,这里真正的新东西是什么?让我们回到考古学的证据上。大约在 6000 年前,由数万人居住的定居点首次出现在人类历史上,几乎在每个大陆都有,起初是孤立的。然后他们成倍增加。要把我们现在对它们的了解纳入一个老式的进化序列,即城市、国家、官僚机构和社会阶层一起出现,是非常困难的事情之一。9是这些城市是多么的不同。这不仅仅是一些早期城市缺乏阶级划分、财富垄断或行政等级制度。它们表现出如此极端的差异性,以至于从一开始就意味着城市形式的有意识的实验。
Contemporary archaeology shows, among other things, that surprisingly few of these early cities contain signs of authoritarian rule. It also shows that their ecology was far more diverse than once believed: cities do not necessarily depend on a rural hinterland in which serfs or peasants engage in back-breaking labour, hauling in cartloads of grain for consumption by urban dwellers. Certainly, that situation became increasingly typical in later ages, but in the first cities small-scale gardening and animal-keeping were often at least as important; so too were the resources of rivers and seas, and for that matter the continued hunting and collecting of wild seasonal foods in forests or in marshes. The particular mix depended largely on where in the world the cities happened to be, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that history’s first city dwellers did not always leave a harsh footprint on the environment, or on each other.
当代考古学表明,除其他外,这些早期城市中很少有专制统治的迹象,令人惊讶。它还表明,它们的生态环境比人们曾经认为的要多样化得多:城市不一定依赖于农村腹地,在那里,农奴或农民从事繁重的劳动,拖着一车车的谷物供城市居民食用。当然,这种情况在后来的时代变得越来越典型,但在最初的城市中,小规模的园艺和动物饲养往往至少是同样重要的;河流和海洋的资源也是如此,而且在森林或沼泽地中继续狩猎和采集野生季节性食物。具体的组合在很大程度上取决于城市所处的位置,但越来越明显的是,历史上的第一批城市居民并不总是对环境或对彼此留下苛刻的足迹。
What were these early cities like to live in?
这些早期的城市是什么样子的?
In what follows we’ll mainly describe what happened in Eurasia, before moving over to Mesoamerica in the next chapter. Of course, the whole story could be told from other geographical perspectives (that of sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, where local trajectories of urban development in the Middle Niger delta stretch back long before the spread of Islam), but there is only so much one can cover in a single volume without doing excessive violence to the subject.10 Each region we consider presents a distinct range of source material for the archaeologist or historian to sift and weigh. In most cases, written evidence is either lacking or extremely limited in scope. (We are still talking here, for the most part, about very early periods of human history, and cultural traditions very different from our own.)
在接下来的内容中,我们将主要描述发生在欧亚大陆的情况,然后在下一章中转到中美洲。当然,整个故事可以从其他地理角度来讲述(例如撒哈拉以南的非洲地区,那里的中尼日尔三角洲的城市发展轨迹可以追溯到伊斯兰教传播之前很久),但在一本书中可以涵盖的内容是有限的,不会对这个主题造成过度的暴力。10我们考虑的每个地区都为考古学家或历史学家提供了一系列不同的原始材料,供其筛选和权衡。在大多数情况下,书面证据要么缺乏,要么范围极其有限。(我们在这里谈论的仍然是,大部分是人类历史的早期时期,以及与我们自己的文化传统非常不同的文化传统。)
We may never be able to reconstruct in any detail the unwritten constitutions of the world’s first cities, or the upheavals that appear to have periodically changed them. Still, what evidence does exist is robust enough, not just to upend the conventional narrative but to open our eyes to possibilities we would otherwise never have considered. Before looking at specific cases, we should at least briefly consider why cities ever appeared in the first place. Did the sort of temporary, seasonal aggregation sites we discussed in earlier chapters gradually become permanent, year-round settlements? That would be a gratifyingly simple story. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be what happened. The reality is more complex and, as usual, a good deal more interesting.
我们可能永远无法详细地重建世界上第一批城市的不成文的宪法,或似乎定期改变它们的动荡。尽管如此,现有的证据仍然足够有力,不仅颠覆了传统的叙述,而且让我们看到了我们本来从未考虑过的可能性。在研究具体案例之前,我们至少应该简要地考虑一下为什么城市会出现。我们在前几章讨论的那种临时的、季节性的聚集地是否逐渐成为永久性的、全年的定居点?这将是一个令人满意的简单故事。不幸的是,这似乎并不是所发生的事情。现实情况更加复杂,而且像往常一样,更加有趣。
Wherever cities emerged, they defined a new phase of world history.11 Let’s call it the ‘early urban world’, an admittedly bland term for what was in many ways a strange phase of the human past. Perhaps it is one of the hardest for us now to grasp, since it was simultaneously so familiar and so alien. We will consider the familiar parts first.
无论城市在哪里出现,它们都定义了世界历史的一个新阶段。11让我们把它称为 “早期城市世界”,一个公认的平淡无奇的术语,用来形容人类过去许多方面的一个奇怪阶段。也许它是我们现在最难掌握的阶段之一,因为它同时又是如此熟悉和陌生。我们将首先考虑熟悉的部分。
Almost everywhere, in these early cities, we find grand, self-conscious statements of civic unity, the arrangement of built spaces in harmonious and often beautiful patterns, clearly reflecting some kind of planning at the municipal scale. Where we do have written sources (ancient Mesopotamia, for example), we find large groups of citizens referring to themselves, not in the idiom of kinship or ethnic ties, but simply as ‘the people’ of a given city (or often its ‘sons and daughters’), united by devotion to its founding ancestors, its gods or heroes, its civic infrastructure and ritual calendar, which always involves at least some occasions for popular festivity.12 Civic festivals were moments when the imaginary structures to which people deferred in their daily lives, but which couldn’t normally be seen, temporarily took on tangible, material form.
在这些早期的城市中,我们几乎到处都能看到关于公民团结的宏大而自觉的声明,建筑空间的安排和谐而通常是美丽的模式,明确反映了某种市政规模的规划。在我们有书面资料的地方(例如古代美索不达米亚),我们发现大量的公民群体不是用亲属关系或种族关系的成语来称呼自己,而是简单地把他们当作某个城市的 “人民”(或者通常是它的 “儿女”),通过对其创始祖先、神或英雄、其公民基础设施和仪式日历的奉献而团结起来,其中至少包括一些大众庆典的场合。12公民节日是人们在,他们的日常生活所依赖的想象的结构,但通常不能被看到的时刻,暂时有了具体的物质形式。
Where there is evidence to be had, we also find differences. People who lived in cities often came from far away. The great city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico was already attracting residents from such distant areas as Yucatán and the Gulf Coast in the third or fourth century AD ; migrants settled there in their own neighbourhoods, including a possible Maya district. Immigrants from across the great floodplains of the Indus buried their loved ones in the cemeteries of Harappa. Typically, ancient cities divided themselves into quarters, which often developed enduring rivalries, and this seems to have been true of the very first cities. Marked out by walls, gates or ditches, consolidated neighbourhoods of this sort were probably not different in any fundamental respect from their modern counterparts.13
在有证据的地方,我们也发现了差异。居住在城市的人往往来自遥远的地方。公元 三、四世纪,墨西哥河谷的特奥蒂瓦坎大城市已经吸引了来自尤卡坦和墨西哥湾沿岸等遥远地区的居民;移民在那里定居在他们自己的街区,包括一个可能的玛雅区。来自印度河大洪泛区的移民将他们的亲人埋葬在哈拉帕的公墓中。典型的情况是,古代城市将自己分成若干个区,这些区往往形成持久的竞争,最早的城市似乎也是如此。以墙、门或沟渠为标志,这种巩固的邻里关系可能在任何基本方面都与现代的对应关系没有区别。13
What makes these cities strange, at least to us, is largely what isn’t there. This is especially true of technology, whether advanced metallurgy, intensive agriculture, social technologies like administrative records, or even the wheel. Any one of these things may, or may not, have been present, depending where in this early urban world we cast our gaze. Here it’s worth recalling that in most of the Americas, before the European invasion, there were neither metal tools nor horses, donkeys, camels or oxen. All movement of people and things was either by foot, canoe or travois. But the scale of pre-Columbian capitals like Teotihuacan or Tenochtitlan dwarfs that of the earliest cities in China and Mesopotamia, and makes the ‘city-states’ of Bronze Age Greece (like Tiryns and Mycenae) seem little more than fortified hamlets.
使这些城市变得奇怪的,至少对我们来说,主要是不存在的东西。技术尤其如此,无论是先进的冶金技术、密集型农业、行政记录等社会技术,甚至是车轮。这些东西中的任何一个都可能存在,也可能不存在,这取决于我们把目光投向这个早期城市世界的哪个地方。这里值得回顾的是,在欧洲人入侵之前的大部分美洲地区,既没有金属工具,也没有马、驴、骆驼或牛。所有的人和物的移动都是靠步行、独木舟或木筏。但像特奥蒂瓦坎或特诺奇蒂特兰这样的前哥伦布首都的规模使中国和美索不达米亚最早的城市相形见绌,并使青铜时代希腊的 “城邦”(如蒂林斯和迈锡尼)看起来只是坚固的小村庄。
In point of fact, the largest early cities, those with the greatest populations, did not appear in Eurasia – with its many technical and logistical advantages – but in Mesoamerica, which had no wheeled vehicles or sailing ships, no animal-powered traction or transport, and much less in the way of metallurgy or literate bureaucracy. This raises an obvious question: why did so many end up living in the same place to begin with? The conventional story looks for the ultimate causes in technological factors: cities were a delayed, but inevitable, effect of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, which started populations on an upward trajectory and set off a chain of other developments, for instance in transport and administration, which made it possible to support large populations living in one place. These large populations then required states to administer them. As we’ve seen, neither part of this story seems to be borne out by the facts.
事实上,最大的早期城市和人口最多的城市并没有出现在欧亚大陆 —— 它有许多技术和后勤方面的优势 —— 而是在中美洲,那里没有轮子车或帆船,没有动物动力的牵引或运输,更没有冶金学或识字的官僚机构。这提出了一个明显的问题:为什么这么多人一开始就生活在同一个地方? 传统的说法是在技术因素中寻找最终原因:城市是 “农业革命” 的一个延迟但不可避免的结果,它使人口开始上升,并引发了一连串的其他发展,例如在运输和管理方面,这使得有可能支持大量人口生活在一个地方。这些庞大的人口需要国家来管理他们。正如我们所看到的,这个故事的两部分似乎都没有得到事实的证实。
Indeed, it’s hard to find a single story. Teotihuacan, for instance, appears to have become such a large city, peaking at perhaps 100,000 souls, mainly because a series of volcanic eruptions and related natural disasters drove entire populations out of their homelands to settle there.14 Ecological factors often played a role in the formation of cities, but in this particular case these would appear to be only obliquely related to the intensification of agriculture. Still, there are hints of a pattern. Across many parts of Eurasia, and in a few parts of the Americas, the appearance of cities follows quite closely on a secondary, post-Ice Age shuffling of the ecological pack which started around 5000 BC . At least two environmental changes were at work here.
事实上,很难找到一个单一的故事。例如,特奥蒂瓦坎似乎已经成为一个巨大的城市,高峰时可能有 10 万人,主要是因为一系列的火山爆发和相关的自然灾害将整个人口从他们的家乡赶到那里定居。14生态因素往往在城市的形成中起作用,但在这个特定的案例中,这些因素似乎只与农业的强化有间接的关系。不过,还是有一种模式的暗示。在欧亚大陆的许多地方,以及美洲的一些地方,城市的出现与公元前 5000 年左右开始的冰河时代后的生态环境的二次洗牌密切相关。这里至少有两个环境变化在起作用。
The first concerns rivers. At the beginning of the Holocene, the world’s great rivers were mostly still wild and unpredictable. Then, around 7,000 years ago, flood regimes started changing, giving way to more settled routines. This is what created wide and highly fertile floodplains along the Yellow River, the Indus, the Tigris and other rivers that we associate with the first urban civilizations. Parallel to this, the melting of polar glaciers slowed down in the Middle Holocene to a point that allowed sea levels the world over to stabilize, at least to a greater degree than they ever had before. The combined effect of these two processes was dramatic; especially where great rivers met the open waters, depositing their seasonal loads of fertile silt faster than seawaters could push them back. This was the origin of those great fan-like deltas we see today at the head of the Mississippi, the Nile or the Euphrates, for instance.15
第一个问题是关于河流的。在全新世之初,世界上的大江大河大多仍是狂野而不可预测的。然后,大约在 7000 年前,洪水制度开始发生变化,让位给更多的定居常规。这就是在黄河、印度河、底格里斯河和其他河流沿岸创造出宽阔和高度肥沃的洪泛区的原因,我们将其与第一批城市文明联系起来。与此平行的是,极地冰川的融化在中全新世减缓到一定程度,使全世界的海平面得以稳定,至少比以前的程度要高。这两个过程的综合影响是戏剧性的;特别是在大河与开阔水域相遇的地方,沉积其季节性的肥沃淤泥的速度比海水推回它们的速度快。这就是我们今天在密西西比河、尼罗河或幼发拉底河头看到的那些大扇形三角洲的起源。15
Comprising well-watered soils, annually sifted by river action, and rich wetland and waterside habitats favoured by migratory game and waterfowl, such deltaic environments were major attractors for human populations. Neolithic farmers gravitated to them, along with their crops and livestock. Hardly surprising, considering these were effectively scaled-up versions of the kind of river, spring and lakeside environments in which Neolithic horticulture first began, but with one other major difference: just over the horizon lay the open sea, and before it expansive marshlands supplying aquatic resources to buffer the risks of farming, as well as a perennial source of organic materials (reeds, fibres, silt) to support construction and manufacturing.16
这样的三角洲环境由水草丰美的土壤组成,每年都会被河水冲刷,还有丰富的湿地和水边生境,受到候鸟和水禽的青睐,是吸引人类居住的主要因素。新石器时代的农民带着他们的农作物和牲畜来到这里。这并不奇怪,考虑到这些环境实际上是新石器时代园艺最早开始的那种河流、泉水和湖泊环境的放大版,但有,还有一个主要区别:在地平线上是开阔的大海,在它之前是广阔的沼泽地,提供水生资源以缓冲耕作的风险,以及多年的有机材料(芦苇、纤维、淤泥)来源以支持建筑和制造。16
All this, combined with the fertility of alluvial soils further inland, promoted the growth of more specialized forms of farming in Eurasia, including the use of animal-drawn ploughs (also adopted in Egypt by 3000 BC ), and the breeding of sheep for wool. Extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization.17 Choices about which crops and animals to farm often had less to do with brute subsistence than the burgeoning industries of early cities, notably textile production, as well as popular forms of urban cuisine such as alcoholic drinks, leavened bread and dairy products. Hunters and foragers, fishers and fowlers were no less important to these new urban economies than farmers and shepherds.18 Peasantries, on the other hand, were a later, secondary development.
所有这些,再加上内陆地区冲积土壤的肥沃,促进了欧亚大陆更专业的农业形式的发展,包括使用动物牵引的犁(公元前 3000 年在埃及也被采用),以及饲养绵羊以获得羊毛。因此,广泛的农业可能是城市化的一个结果,而不是一个原因。17选择耕种哪种作物和动物,往往与残酷的生计无关,而与早期城市的新兴产业,特别是纺织品生产,以及流行的城市饮食形式,如酒精饮料、发面面包和乳制品有关。猎人和觅食者、渔民和打猎者对这些新的城市经济的重要性不亚于农民和牧民。18另一方面,农民则是后来的次要发展。
Wetlands and floodplains are no friends to archaeological survival. Often, these earliest phases of urban occupation lie beneath later deposits of silt, or the remains of cities grown over them. In many parts of the world, the first available evidence relates to an already mature phase of urban expansion: by the time the picture comes into focus, we already see a marsh metropolis, or network of centres, out-scaling all previous known settlements by a factor of ten to one. Some of these cities in former wetlands have only emerged very recently into historical view – virgin births from the bulrushes. The results are often striking, and their implications still unclear.
湿地和洪泛区不是考古学生存的朋友。通常情况下,这些最早的城市占领阶段位于后来的淤泥沉积之下,或者是生长在淤泥之上的城市遗迹。在世界的许多地方,最早的证据与已经成熟的城市扩张阶段有关:当画面出现时,我们已经看到一个沼泽大都市或中心网络,比以前所有已知的定居点要大十倍。其中一些位于前湿地的城市只是最近才出现在历史视野中 —— 从沼泽中诞生的处女。其结果往往是惊人的,而其影响仍不清楚。
We now know, for instance, that in China’s Shandong province, on the lower reaches of the Yellow River, settlements of 300 hectares or more – such as Liangchengzhen and Yaowangcheng – were present by no later than 2500 BC, which is over 1,000 years before the earliest royal dynasties developed on the Central Chinese plains. On the other side of the Pacific, around the same time, ceremonial centres of great magnitude developed in the valley of Peru’s Rio Supe, notably at the site of Caral, where archaeologists have uncovered sunken plazas and monumental platforms four millennia older than the Inca Empire.19 The extent of human habitation around these great centres is still to be determined.
例如,我们现在知道,在中国的山东省,在黄河下游,300 公顷或更大的定居点 —— 如梁城镇和尧王城 —— 最迟在公元前 2500 年就已出现,这比中国中部平原最早的王室王朝发展要早 1000 多年。在太平洋的另一边,大约在同一时期,在秘鲁的 Rio Supe 河谷发展了规模巨大的礼仪中心,特别是在卡拉尔遗址,考古学家在那里发现了比印加帝国还要早四千年的下沉广场和纪念性平台。19在这些伟大的中心周围,人类居住的范围仍有待确定。
These new findings show that archaeologists still have much to find out about the distribution of the world’s first cities. They also indicate how much older those cities may be than the systems of authoritarian government and literate administration that were once assumed necessary for their foundation. Similar revelations are emerging from the Maya lowlands, where ceremonial centres of truly enormous size – and, so far, presenting no evidence of monarchy or stratification – can now be dated back as far as 1000 BC : more than 1,000 years before the rise of Classic Maya kings, whose royal cities were notably smaller in scale.20 This, in turn, raises a fascinating but difficult question. What held the earliest experiments in urbanization together, other than reeds, fibres and clay? What was their social glue? It is high time for some examples but, before we examine the great valley civilizations of the Tigris, Indus and Yellow Rivers, we will first visit the interior grasslands of eastern Europe.
这些新的发现表明,考古学家对世界上第一批城市的分布仍有许多东西需要了解。它们还表明,这些城市可能比专制政府和文人管理制度要早得多,而这些制度曾被认为是建立城市的必要条件。玛雅低地也出现了类似的启示,在那里,真正规模巨大的礼仪中心 —— 到目前为止,没有君主制或分层的证据 —— 现在可以追溯到公元前 1000 年:比古典玛雅国王的崛起早 1000 多年,他们的王室城市规模明显较小。20这反过来又提出了一个迷人但困难的问题。除了芦苇、纤维和粘土之外,是什么将最早的城市化实验联系在一起?他们的社会纽带是什么?现在是提供一些例子的时候了,但是,在我们研究底格里斯河、印度河和黄河的大河谷文明之前,我们将首先访问东欧的内陆草原。
The remote history of the countries around the Black Sea is awash with gold. At least, any casual visitor to the major museums of Sofia, Kiev or Tbilisi could be forgiven for leaving with this impression. Ever since the days of Herodotus, outsiders to the region have come home full of lurid tales about the lavish funerals of warrior-kings, and the mass slaughter of horses and retainers that accompanied them. Over 1,000 years later, in the tenth century AD, the traveller Ibn Fadlan was telling almost identical stories to impress and titillate his Arab readers.
黑海周边国家的遥远历史充斥着黄金。至少,在索非亚、基辅或第比利斯的主要博物馆里,任何不经意的访客都可以被原谅,留下这样的印象。自希罗多德时代以来,来到该地区的外地人在回家时都充满了关于战士国王的豪华葬礼以及伴随他们的大规模屠杀马匹和家臣的淫秽故事。1000 多年后,在公元 10 世纪,旅行家伊本·法德兰(Ibn Fadlan)讲述了几乎相同的故事,以打动和刺激他的阿拉伯读者。
As a result, in these lands the term ‘prehistory’ (or sometimes ‘proto-history’) has always evoked the legacy of aristocratic tribes and lavish tombs crammed with treasure. Such tombs are, certainly, there to be found. On the region’s western flank, in Bulgaria, they begin with the gold-soaked cemetery of Varna, oddly placed in what regional archaeologists refer to as the Copper Age, corresponding to the fifth millennium BC . To the east, in southernmost Russia, a tradition of extravagant funeral rites began shortly after, associated with burial mounds known as kurgans, which do indeed mark the resting places of warrior princes of one sort or another.21
因此,在这些土地上,“史前史”(有时是 “原史”)一词总是让人联想到贵族部落的遗产和塞满财宝的豪华墓穴。当然,这样的墓葬在那里是可以找到的。在该地区的西侧,在保加利亚,它们从瓦尔纳的黄金墓地开始,奇怪的是,它被置于地区考古学家称为铜器时代,相当于公元前五千年的。在东部,在俄罗斯最南部,奢侈的葬礼仪式的传统在不久之后就开始了,与被称为库尔干的墓穴有关,这些墓穴确实标志着这样或那样的战士王子的休息场所。21
But it turns out this wasn’t the whole story. In fact, magnificent warrior tombs might not even be the most interesting aspect of the region’s prehistory. There were also cities. Archaeologists in Ukraine and Moldova got their first inkling of them in the 1970s, when they began to detect the existence of human settlements older and much larger than anything they had previously encountered.22 Further research showed that these settlements, often referred to as ‘mega-sites’ – with their modern names of Taljanky, Maidenetske, Nebelivka and so on – dated to the early and middle centuries of the fourth millennium BC, which meant that some existed even before the earliest known cities in Mesopotamia. They were also larger in area.
但事实证明,这并不是故事的全部。事实上,宏伟的战士墓甚至可能不是该地区史前史最有趣的方面。那里还有城市。乌克兰和摩尔多瓦的考古学家们在 20 世纪 70 年代首次发现了这些城市,当时他们开始发现存在比他们以前遇到的任何东西都要古老和大得多的人类定居点。22进一步的研究表明,这些通常被称为 “巨型遗址” 的定居点 —— 其现代名称为 Taljanky、Maidenetske、Nebelivka 等 —— 可以追溯到公元前四千年的早期和中期,这意味着一些定居点甚至比美索不达米亚最早的已知城市更早存在。它们的面积也较大。
Yet, even now, in scholarly discussions about the origins of urbanism, these Ukrainian sites almost never come up. Indeed, the very use of the term ‘mega-site’ is a kind of euphemism, signalling to a wider audience that these should not be thought of as proper cities but as something more like villages that for some reason had expanded inordinately in size. Some archaeologists even refer to them outright as ‘overgrown villages’. How do we account for this reluctance to welcome the Ukrainian mega-sites into the charmed circle of urban origins? Why has anyone with even a passing interest in the origin of cities heard of Uruk or Mohenjo-daro, but almost no one of Taljanky?
然而,即使是现在,在学术界关于城市化起源的讨论中,这些乌克兰遗址几乎从未出现过。事实上,使用 “巨型遗址” 这一术语本身就是一种委婉的说法,向更多的人表明,这些遗址不应该被认为是适当的城市,而更像是由于某种原因而过度扩张的村庄。一些考古学家甚至把它们直接称为 “杂草丛生的村庄”。我们如何解释这种不愿意欢迎乌克兰大型遗址进入城市起源的魅力圈的做法?为什么对城市起源稍有兴趣的人都听说过乌鲁克或摩亨佐·达罗,但几乎没有人听说过塔尔扬基?
The answer is largely political. Some of it concerns simple geopolitics: much of the initial work of discovery was carried out by Eastern Bloc scholars during the Cold War, which not only slowed down the reception of their findings in Western academic circles but tended to tinge any news of surprising discoveries with at least a tiny bit of scepticism. Even more, perhaps, it had to do with the internal political life of the prehistoric settlements themselves. That is, according to conventional views of politics, there didn’t seem to be any. No evidence was unearthed of centralized government or administration – or indeed, any form of ruling class. In other words, these enormous settlements had all the hallmarks of what evolutionists would call a ‘simple’, not a ‘complex’ society.
答案在很大程度上是政治性的。其中一些涉及到简单的地缘政治:大部分最初的发现工作是由东欧集团的学者在冷战期间进行的,这不仅减缓了他们的发现在西方学术界的接受程度,而且往往使任何令人惊讶的发现的消息至少带有一点点的怀疑。更重要的是,这也许与史前定居点本身的内部政治生活有关。也就是说,根据传统的政治观点,似乎并没有任何政治。没有出土的证据表明有集中的政府或行政机构 —— 或者说,任何形式的统治阶层。换句话说,这些巨大的定居点具有进化论者所说的 “简单” 而非 “复杂” 社会的所有特征。
It’s hard here not to recall Ursula Le Guin’s famous short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, about the imaginary city of Omelas, a city which also made do without kings, wars, slaves or secret police. We have a tendency, Le Guin notes, to write off such a community as ‘simple’, but in fact these citizens of Omelas were ‘not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us.’ The trouble is just that ‘we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.’
在这里很难不想起厄休拉·勒奎恩的著名短篇小说《离开欧米拉斯的人》,关于想象中的欧米拉斯城市,这个城市也没有国王、战争、奴隶或秘密警察。勒奎恩指出,我们有一种倾向,把这样的社区写成 “简单”,但事实上,这些欧米拉斯的市民 “不是简单的人,不是沉闷的牧羊人、高贵的野蛮人、平淡的乌托邦。他们的复杂程度并不亚于我们”。问题只是,“我们有一个坏习惯,在学者和老练的人的鼓励下,把幸福视为相当愚蠢的东西。”
Le Guin has a point. Obviously, we have no idea how relatively happy the inhabitants of Ukrainian mega-sites like Maidenetske or Nebelivka were, compared to the lords who constructed kurgan burials, or even the retainers ritually sacrificed at their funerals; or the bonded labourers who provided wheat and barley to the inhabitants of later Greek colonies along the Black Sea coast (though we can guess), and as anyone who has read the story knows, Omelas had some problems too. But the point remains: why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications – that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty – are somehow less complex than those who have not?
勒古恩说得有道理。显然,我们不知道像 Maidenetske 或 Nebelivka 这样的乌克兰大遗址的居民有多大的相对幸福,与建造库尔干墓葬的领主相比,甚至与在他们的葬礼中被祭祀的家臣相比;或者与为后来希腊黑海沿岸殖民地的居民提供小麦和大麦的债役工相比(尽管我们可以猜到),而且正如读过这个故事的人所知道的,欧麦拉也有一些问题。但问题仍然是:为什么我们认为那些已经想出办法让大量人口在没有寺庙、宫殿和军事防御工事的情况下进行管理和自我支持的人 —— 也就是说,没有公开展示傲慢、自卑和残忍的人 —— 在某种程度上不如那些没有的人复杂?
Why would we hesitate to dignify such a place with the name of ‘city’?
为什么我们会犹豫不决地将这样一个地方命名为 “城市”?
The mega-sites of Ukraine and adjoining regions were inhabited from roughly 4100 to 3300 BC, that is, for something in the order of eight centuries, which is considerably longer than most subsequent urban traditions. Why were they there at all? Like the cities of Mesopotamia and the Indus valley, they appear to have been born of ecological opportunism in the middle phase of the Holocene. Not floodplain dynamics, in this case, but processes of soil formation on the flatlands north of the Black Sea. These black earths (Russian: chernozem) are legendary for their fertility; for the empires of later antiquity, they made the lands between the Southern Bug and Dniepr Rivers a breadbasket (which is why Greek city-states established colonies in the region and enslaved or made serfs of the local populations to begin with: ancient Athens was largely fed by Black Sea grain).
乌克兰和毗邻地区的大型遗址大约从公元前 4100 年到公元前 3300 年一直有人居住,也就是说,大约有八个世纪的时间,这比大多数后来的城市传统要长得多。他们为什么会在那里?像美索不达米亚和印度河流域的城市一样,它们似乎是在全新世中期的生态机会主义中诞生的。在这种情况下,不是洪泛区的动力,而是黑海北部平地的土壤形成过程。这些黑土(俄语:chernozem,切尔诺泽姆)因其肥沃而富有传奇色彩;对于后来的古代帝国来说,它们使南布格河和第聂伯河之间的土地成为粮仓(这就是为什么希腊城邦在该地区建立了殖民地,并从一开始就奴役或使当地人口成为农奴:古代雅典主要靠黑海谷物为生)。
By 4500 BC, chernozem was widely distributed between the Carpathian and the Ural Mountains, where a mosaic landscape of open prairie and woodland emerged capable of supporting dense human habitation.23 The Neolithic people who settled there had travelled east from the lower reaches of the Danube, passing through the Carpathian Mountains. We do not know why, but we do know that – throughout their peregrinations in river valleys and mountain passes – they retained a cohesive social identity. Their villages, often small in scale, shared similar cultural practices, reflected in the forms taken by their dwellings, female figurines and ways of making and serving food. The archaeological name given to this particular ‘design for life’ is the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture, after the sites where it was first recorded.24
到公元前 4500 年,切尔诺泽姆广泛分布在喀尔巴阡山脉和乌拉尔山脉之间,那里出现了一个由开放的大草原和林地组成的马赛克景观,能够支持密集的人类居住。23在那里定居的新石器时代的人从多瑙河下游向东走,经过喀尔巴阡山脉。我们不知道为什么,但我们知道 —— 在他们在河谷和山路上的跋涉中 —— 他们保留了一个有凝聚力的社会身份。他们的村庄通常规模不大,却有着相似的文化习俗,这反映在他们的住宅、女性雕像以及制作和供应食物的方式上。这种特殊的 “生活设计” 的考古学名称是 Cucuteni-Tripolye 文化,这是以其首次被记录的地点命名的。24
So the Ukrainian and Moldovan mega-sites did not come out of thin air. They were the physical realization of an extended community that already existed long before its constituent units coalesced into large settlements. Some tens of these settlements have now been documented. The biggest currently known – Taljanky – extends over an area of 300 hectares, outspanning the earliest phases of the city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia. It presents no evidence of central administration or communal storage facilities. Nor have any government buildings, fortifications or monumental architecture been found. There is no acropolis or civic centre; no equivalent to Uruk’s raised public district called Eanna (‘House of Heaven’) or the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro.
因此,乌克兰和摩尔多瓦的大型定居点并不是凭空出现的。它们是在其组成单位凝聚成大型定居点之前就已经存在的一个扩展社区的实际实现。现在已经有大约几十个这样的定居点被记录下来。目前已知的最大的定居点 —— Taljanky —— 占地 300 公顷,超过了美索不达米亚南部的乌鲁克城的最早阶段。它没有显示出中央管理或公共储存设施的证据。也没有发现任何政府建筑、防御工事或纪念性建筑。这里没有卫城或公民中心;没有与乌鲁克被称为 Eanna(“天堂之家”)的高架公共区或摩亨佐·达罗的大浴场相当的建筑。
What we do find are houses; well over 1,000 in the case of Taljanky. Rectangular houses, sixteen or so feet wide and twice as long, built of wattle and daub on timber frames, with stone foundations. With their attached gardens, these houses form such neat circular patterns that from a bird’s-eye view, any mega-site resembles the inside of a tree trunk: great rings, with concentric spaces between. The innermost ring frames a big gap in the middle of the settlement, where early excavators at first expected to find something dramatic, whether magnificent buildings or grand burials. But in every known case, the central area is simply empty; guesses for its function range from popular assemblies to ceremonies or the seasonal penning of animals – or possibly all three.25 In consequence, the standard archaeological plan of a Ukrainian mega-site is all flesh, no core.
我们确实发现了一些房屋;就 Taljanky 而言,其数量远远超过 1000 座。长方形的房子,宽 16 英尺左右,长 2 倍,由木头框架上的瓦片和涂鸦建成,有石头地基。这些房屋及其附属的花园形成了整齐的圆形图案,从鸟的角度看,任何一个大型场所都像一个树干的内部:巨大的环,中间有同心的空间。最内层的环形结构在聚落的中间有一个很大的空隙,早期的挖掘者最初期望在那里发现一些戏剧性的东西,无论是宏伟的建筑还是宏伟的墓葬。但在每个已知的案例中,中央区域都是空的;对其功能的猜测包括民众集会、仪式或动物的季节性圈养 —— 也可能是三者都有。25因此,乌克兰大型遗址的标准考古计划是只有肉体,没有核心。
Just as surprising as their scale is the distribution of these massive settlements, which are all quite close to each other, at most six to nine miles apart.26 Their total population – estimated in the many thousands per mega-site, and probably well over 10,000 in some cases – would therefore have had to draw resources from a common hinterland. Yet their ecological footprint appears to have been surprisingly light.27 There are a number of possible explanations. Some have suggested the mega-sites were only occupied part of the year, even for just a season,28 making them urban-scale versions of the kind of temporary aggregation sites we discussed in Chapter Three. This is difficult to reconcile with the substantial nature of their houses (consider the effort expended in felling trees, laying foundations, making good walls etc.). More probably, the mega-sites were much like most other cities, neither permanently inhabited nor strictly seasonal, but somewhere in between.29
与其规模同样令人惊讶的是这些大规模的居民点的分布情况,它们彼此之间都很接近,最多相距 6 至 9 英里。26他们的总人口 —— 估计每个巨型遗址有数千人,在某些情况下可能远远超过一万人 —— 因此必须从一个共同的腹地获取资源。然而,他们的生态足迹似乎出奇的轻。27有许多可能的解释。一些人认为,这些巨型遗址只在一年中的部分时间被占用,甚至只占用一个季节。28使得它们成为我们在第三章讨论的那种临时聚集地的城市规模版本。这很难与他们的房屋的实质性质相协调(考虑到在砍伐树木、打地基、建造良好的墙壁等方面所花费的精力)。更有可能的是,巨型遗址与大多数其他城市一样,既不是永久居住,也不是严格的季节性,而是介于两者之间。29
We should also consider if the inhabitants of the mega-sites consciously managed their ecosystem to avoid large-scale deforestation. This is consistent with archaeological studies of their economy, which suggest a pattern of small-scale gardening, often taking place within the bounds of the settlement, combined with the keeping of livestock, cultivation of orchards, and a wide spectrum of hunting and foraging activities. The diversity is actually remarkable, as is its sustainability. As well as wheat, barley and pulses, the citizens’ plant diet included apples, pears, cherries, sloes, acorns, hazelnuts and apricots. Mega-site dwellers were hunters of red deer, roe deer and wild boar as well as farmers and foresters. It was ‘play farming’ on a grand scale: an urban populus supporting itself through small-scale cultivation and herding, combined with an extraordinary array of wild foods.30
我们还应该考虑巨型遗址的居民是否有意识地管理他们的生态系统以避免大规模的森林砍伐。这与对其经济的考古研究是一致的,这些研究表明小规模的园艺模式,通常是在定居点的范围内进行的,同时还有饲养牲畜、种植果园以及广泛的狩猎和觅食活动。这种多样性实际上是显著的,其可持续性也是如此。除了小麦、大麦和豆类外,市民的植物饮食还包括苹果、梨、樱桃、苏子、橡子、榛子和杏子。大地居民是红鹿、狍子和野猪的猎人,也是农民和林务员。这是大规模的 “游戏农业”:城市人口通过小规模的种植和放牧,结合一系列非凡的野生食物来养活自己。30
This way of life was by no means ‘simple’. As well as managing orchards, gardens, livestock and woodlands, the inhabitants of these cities imported salt in bulk from springs in the eastern Carpathians and the Black Sea littoral. Flint extraction by the ton took place in the Dniestr valley, furnishing material for tools. A household potting industry flourished, its products considered among the finest ceramics of the prehistoric world; and regular supplies of copper flowed in from the Balkans.31 There is no firm consensus among archaeologists about what sort of social arrangements all this required, but most would agree the logistical challenges were daunting. A surplus was definitely produced, and with it ample potential for some to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over others or battle for the spoils; but over eight centuries we find little evidence for warfare or the rise of social elites. The true complexity of the mega-sites lies in the strategies they adopted to prevent such things.
这种生活方式绝非 “简单”。除了管理果园、花园、牲畜和林地之外,这些城市的居民还从喀尔巴阡山脉东部和黑海沿岸的泉水中大量进口盐。在德涅斯特河谷,人们以吨为单位开采燧石,为工具提供材料。家庭制陶业蓬勃发展,其产品被认为是史前世界最好的陶瓷之一;铜的定期供应也从巴尔干半岛流来。31考古学家们对这一切需要什么样的社会安排还没有达成一致意见,但大多数人都同意,后勤方面的挑战是非常艰巨的。,肯定会产生过剩,这就为一些人夺取库存和供应的控制权、支配他人或争夺战利品提供了充足的可能性;但在八个世纪中,我们几乎没有发现战争或社会精英崛起的证据。巨型遗址的真正复杂性在于他们为防止这种事情而采取的策略。
How did it all work? In the absence of written records (or a time machine), there are serious limits to what we can say about kinship and inheritance, or how people in these cities went about making collective decisions.32 Still, some clues exist, beginning at the level of individual households. Each of these had a roughly common plan, but each was also, in its own way, unique. From one dwelling to the next there is constant innovation, even playfulness, in the rules of commensality. Each family unit invented its own slight variations on domestic rituals, reflected in its unique assemblage of serving and eating vessels, painted with polychrome designs of often mesmerizing intensity and made in a dazzling variety of forms. It’s as if every household was an artists’ collective which invented its own unique aesthetic style.
这一切是如何进行的?在没有书面记录(或时间机器)的情况下,我们对亲属关系和继承的说法有很大的限制,或者说这些城市的人们是如何进行集体决策的。32不过,还是有一些线索存在,从个别家庭的层面开始。每个家庭都有一个大致相同的计划,但每个家庭也都以自己的方式独特。从一个住宅到另一个住宅,在共同生活的规则中都有不断的创新,甚至是玩耍。每个家庭单位都发明了自己的家庭仪式的轻微变化,反映在其独特的服务和饮食器皿的组合上,这些器皿上的多色设计往往具有令人着迷的强度,并以令人眼花缭乱的形式制作。就好像每个家庭都是一个艺术家的集体,发明了自己独特的审美风格。
Some of this household pottery evokes the bodies of women; and among the other items most commonly found within the remains of houses are female figurines of clay. Model houses and tiny replicas of furniture and eating equipment also survive – miniature representations of lost social worlds, again, affirming the prominent role of women within them.33 All this tells us a little about the cultural atmosphere of these households (and one can easily see why Marija Gimbutas, whose syntheses of Eurasian prehistory we discussed earlier, considered the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture to be part of ‘Old Europe’, with its cultural roots in the early farming societies of Anatolia and the Middle East). But how did these households come together in such numbers to form the great concentric arrangements which give the Ukrainian mega-sites their distinctive plan?
这些家用陶器中的一些唤起了妇女的身体;在房屋遗迹中最常发现的其他物品中,有女性泥塑。房屋模型以及家具和饮食设备的微小复制品也存留了下来 —— 这些都是失去的社会世界的缩影,再次肯定了妇女在其中的突出作用。33所有这些都告诉我们这些家庭的文化氛围(我们很容易理解为什么 Marija Gimbutas,我们之前讨论过他对欧亚史前的综合研究,认为库库特尼·特里波利文化是 “旧欧洲” 的一部分,其文化根基在安纳托利亚和中东的早期农业社会)。但是,这些家庭是如何以如此之多的数量聚集在一起,形成巨大的同心排列,使乌克兰的巨型遗址具有独特的规划?
The first impression of these sites is one of rigid uniformity, a closed circuit of social interaction, but closer study reveals constant deviation from the norm. Individual households would sometimes opt to cluster together in groups of between three and ten families. Ditches or pits marked their boundaries. At some sites these groups coalesce into neighbourhoods, radiating out from the centre to the perimeter of the city, and even forming larger residential districts or quarters. Each had access to at least one assembly house, a structure larger than an ordinary dwelling where a wider sector of the population might gather periodically for activities we can only guess at (political meetings? legal proceedings? seasonal festivities?).34
这些遗址给人的第一印象是僵硬的统一性,是社会互动的封闭回路,但仔细研究后发现,这些遗址不断偏离常规。单个家庭有时会选择聚集在一起,组成三到十个家庭的小组。沟渠或坑洞标志着他们的边界。在一些遗址,这些群体凝聚成邻里,从城市中心向周边辐射,甚至形成更大的住宅区或街区。每个人都至少有一个集会所,一个比普通住宅更大的结构,在那里,更多的人可能会定期聚集在一起,进行我们只能猜测的活动(政治会议、法律诉讼、季节性庆典?)34
Careful analysis by archaeologists shows how the apparent uniformity of the Ukrainian mega-sites arose from the bottom up, through processes of local decision-making.35 This would have to mean that members of individual households – or at least, their neighbourhood representatives – shared a conceptual framework for the settlement as a whole. We can also safely infer that this framework was based on the image of a circle and its properties of transformation. To understand how the citizens put this mental image into effect, translating it into a workable social reality at such enormous scales, we cannot rely on archaeology alone. Fortunately, the burgeoning field of ethno-mathematics shows exactly how such a system might have worked in practice. The most informative case we know of is that of traditional Basque settlements in the highlands of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques.
考古学家的仔细分析表明,乌克兰大型遗址的明显统一性是如何自下而上,通过地方决策过程产生的。35这就意味着各个家庭的成员 —— 或者至少是他们的邻里代表 —— 对整个定居点有一个共同的概念框架。我们也可以有把握地推断,这个框架是基于圆的形象和它的转化属性。为了了解公民如何将这一心理形象付诸实施,在如此巨大的范围内将其转化为可行的社会现实,我们不能仅仅依靠考古学。幸运的是,新兴的民族数学领域确切地显示了这样一个系统在实践中是如何运作的。我们知道的最有参考价值的案例是比利牛斯·大西洋高地的传统巴斯克定居点。
These modern Basque societies – tucked down in the southwest corner of France – also imagine their communities in circular form, just as they imagine themselves as being surrounded by a circle of mountains. They do so as a way of emphasizing the ideal equality of households and family units. Now, obviously, the social arrangements of these existing communities are unlikely to be quite the same as those of ancient Ukraine. Nonetheless, they provide an excellent illustration of how such circular arrangements can form part of self-conscious egalitarian projects, in which ‘everyone has neighbours to the left and neighbours to the right. No one is first, and no one is last.’36
这些现代巴斯克社会 —— 隐藏在法国的西南角 —— 也把他们的社区想象成圆形,就像他们把自己想象成被一圈山包围一样。他们这样做是为了强调家庭和家庭单位的理想平等。现在,显然,这些现有社区的社会安排不太可能与古代乌克兰的社区完全相同。然而,它们提供了一个很好的例子,说明这种循环安排如何能够构成自觉的平等主义项目的一部分,在这种项目中,“每个人都有左邻右舍。没有人是第一,也没有人是最后。”36
In the commune of Sainte-Engrâce, for instance, the circular template of the village is also a dynamic model used as a counting device, to ensure the seasonal rotation of essential tasks and duties. Each Sunday, one household will bless two loaves at the local church, eat one, then present the other to its ‘first neighbour’ (the house to their right); the next week that neighbour will do the same to the next house to its right, and so on in a clockwise direction, so that in a community of 100 households it would take about two years to complete a full cycle.37
例如,在圣恩格拉斯(Sainte-Engrâce)公社,村庄的圆形模板也是一个动态模型,被用作计数装置,以确保基本任务和职责的季节性轮换。每个星期天,一户人家会在当地教堂祝福两个面包,吃掉一个,然后把另一个送给它的 “第一个邻居”(他们右边的房子);下个星期,这个邻居会对它右边的下一个房子做同样的事情,以此类推,按顺时针方向进行,这样,在一个有 100 户人家的社区,大约需要两年时间才能完成整个循环。37
As so often with such matters, there is an entire cosmology, a theory of the human condition, baked in, as it were: the loaves are spoken of as ‘semen’, as something that gives life; meanwhile, care for the dead and dying travels in the opposite, counter-clockwise direction. But the system is also the basis for economic co-operation. If any one household is for any reason unable to fulfil its obligations when it is time to do so, a careful system of substitution comes into play, so neighbours at first, second and sometimes third remove can temporarily take their place. This in turn provides the model for virtually all forms of co-operation. The same system of ‘first neighbours’ and substitution, the same serial model of reciprocity, is used to call up anything that requires more hands than a single family can provide: from planting and harvesting to cheese-making and slaughtering pigs. It follows that households cannot simply schedule their daily labour in line with their own needs. They also have to consider their obligations to other households, which in turn have their own obligations to other, different households, and so on. Factoring in that some tasks – such as moving flocks to highland pastures, or the demands of milking, shearing and guarding herds – may require the combined efforts of ten different households, and that households have to balance the scheduling of numerous different sorts of commitment, we begin to get a sense of the complexities involved.
就像这种事情经常发生的那样,有一个完整的宇宙论,一个关于人类状况的理论,就像它被烘烤出来的那样:面包被说成是 “精液”,是给予生命的东西;同时,对死者和濒死者的关怀以相反的、逆时针的方向进行着。但这个系统也是经济合作的基础。如果任何一个家庭由于任何原因不能履行其义务,一个谨慎的替代系统就会发挥作用,所以第一、第二、有时第三的邻居可以暂时代替他们的位置。这反过来又为几乎所有形式的合作提供了模式。同样的 “第一邻居” 和替代系统,同样的互惠系列模式,被用来召集任何需要更多人手的事情,而不是一个家庭可以提供的:从种植和收获到奶酪制作和屠宰猪只。因此,家庭不能简单地按照自己的需要来安排日常劳动。他们还必须考虑自己对其他家庭的义务,而其他家庭又对其他不同的家庭有自己的义务,等等。考虑到有些任务 —— 如将羊群转移到高原牧场,或挤奶、剪羊毛和看守羊群的要求 —— 可能需要十个不同家庭的共同努力,以及家庭必须平衡安排许多不同种类的承诺,我们开始对其中的复杂性有所了解。
In other words, such ‘simple’ economies are rarely all that simple. They often involve logistical challenges of striking complexity, resolved on a basis of intricate systems of mutual aid, all without any need of centralized control or administration. Basque villagers in this region are self-conscious egalitarians, in the sense that they insist each household is ultimately the same and has the same responsibilities as any others; yet rather than governing themselves through communal assemblies (which earlier generations of Basque townsfolk famously created in places like Guernica), they rely on mathematical principles such as rotation, serial replacement and alternation. But the end result is the same, and the system flexible enough that changes in the number of households or the capacities of their individual members can be continually taken into account, ensuring relations of equality are preserved over the long term, with an almost complete absence of internal conflict.
换句话说,这种 “简单” 的经济很少那么简单。它们往往涉及到惊人复杂的后勤挑战,在复杂的互助系统的基础上解决,所有这些都不需要任何中央控制或管理。这个地区的巴斯克村民是自觉的平等主义者,因为他们坚持认为每个家庭最终都是一样的,并且与其他家庭有同样的责任;然而,他们不是通过社区大会来管理自己(前几代巴斯克村民在格尔尼卡等地创建了著名的社区大会),而是依靠数学原理,如轮换、连续替换和交替。但最终的结果是一样的,而且这个系统足够灵活,可以不断地考虑到家庭数量或个人成员能力的变化,确保平等关系得到长期维护,几乎完全没有内部冲突。
There is no reason to assume that such a system would only work on a small scale: a village of 100 households is already way beyond Dunbar’s proposed cognitive threshold of 150 people (the number of stable, trusting relationships we are able to keep track of in our minds, before – according, that is, to Dunbar – we are obliged to start putting chiefs and administrators in charge of social affairs); and Basque villages and towns used to be far larger than this. One can at least begin to see how – in a different context – such egalitarian systems might scale up to communities of many hundreds or even thousands of households. Returning to the Ukrainian mega-sites, we must admit that much remains unknown. Around the middle of the fourth millennium BC, most of them were basically abandoned. We still don’t know why. What they offer us, in the meantime, is significant: proof that highly egalitarian organization has been possible on an urban scale.38 With this in mind, we can look with fresh eyes at some better-known cases from other parts of Eurasia. Let’s start with Mesopotamia.
没有理由认为这样的制度只能在小范围内发挥作用:一个 100 户的村庄已经远远超过了邓巴提出的 150 人的认知门槛(在 —— 也就是邓巴所说的 —— 我们不得不开始让酋长和行政人员负责社会事务之前,我们能够在头脑中记录的稳定、信任的关系数量);而巴斯克的村庄和城镇曾经远远大于这个数字。人们至少可以开始看到 —— 在不同的环境下 —— 这种平等主义制度是如何扩展到数百甚至数千户的社区的。回到乌克兰的大遗址,我们必须承认仍有许多未知数。大约在公元前四千年中期,它们中的大多数基本上都被抛弃了。我们仍然不知道原因。同时,它们为我们提供了重要的东西:证明高度平均主义的组织在城市规模上是可能的。38考虑到这一点,我们可以用新的眼光来看待欧亚大陆其他地区的一些更知名的案例。让我们从美索不达米亚开始。
‘Mesopotamia’ means ‘land between the two rivers’. Archaeologists sometimes also call this region the ‘heartland of cities’.39 Its floodplains cross the otherwise arid landscape of southern Iraq, turning to marshland as they near the head of the Persian Gulf.40 Urban life here goes back at least to 3500 BC . In the more northerly lands between the Tigris and Euphrates, where the rivers flow through rain-fed plains, the history of cities may go even further back, beyond 4000 BC .41
“美索不达米亚” 意味着 “两河之间的土地”。考古学家有时也称这个地区为 “城市的中心地带”。39它的洪泛区穿过伊拉克南部原本干旱的地貌,在靠近波斯湾头时变成了沼泽地。40这里的城市生活至少可以追溯到公元前 3500 年。在底格里斯河和幼发拉底河之间更北的土地上,河流流经雨水充沛的平原,城市的历史可能会更久远,超过公元前 4000 年。41
Unlike the Ukrainian mega-sites, or the Bronze Age cities of the Indus valley to which we’ll turn shortly, Mesopotamia was already part of modern memory before any archaeologist put a spade into one of its ancient mounds.42 Anyone who had read the Bible knew about the kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria; and in the Victorian era of high empire, biblical scholars and Orientalists began excavating sites with scriptural associations, like Nineveh and Nimrud, hoping to uncover cities ruled by figures of legend such as Nebuchadnezzar, Sennacherib or Tiglath-Pileser. They did find these; but in those places and elsewhere they discovered other things that were even more spectacular, like a basalt stela bearing the law code of Hammurabi, ruler of Babylon in the eighteenth century BC, unearthed at Susa in western Iran; clay tablets from Nineveh bearing copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh, fabled ruler of Uruk; and the Royal Tombs of Ur in southern Iraq, where kings and queens unknown to the Bible were interred with startling riches and the remains of sacrificed retainers around 2500 BC .
与乌克兰的大型遗址或我们很快就会提到的印度河流域的青铜时代城市不同,美索不达米亚在任何一个考古学家将铲子投入其古代土丘之前就已经成为现代记忆的一部分。42任何读过《圣经》的人都知道巴比伦和亚述王国;在维多利亚时代的高度帝国时代,圣经学者和东方学家开始挖掘与《圣经》有关的遗址,如尼尼微和尼姆鲁德,希望能发现由尼布甲尼撒、 森纳赫里布或提格拉特·皮莱塞等传奇人物统治的城市。他们确实发现了这些东西;但在这些地方和其他地方,他们还发现了其他更壮观的东西,比如在伊朗西部的苏萨出土的带有公元前 18 世纪巴比伦统治者汉谟拉比法典的玄武岩石碑。来自尼尼微的泥板,上面有传说中的乌鲁克统治者《吉尔伽美什史诗》的副本;以及伊拉克南部乌尔的皇家陵墓,那里埋葬着《圣经》中不为人知的国王和王后,还有惊人的财富和公元前 2500 年左右牺牲的家臣的遗体。
There were even bigger surprises. The oldest remains of cities and kingdoms – including the Royal Tombs of Ur – belonged to a culture previously unknown, and not mentioned in scripture: the Sumerians, who used a language unrelated to the Semitic family from which Hebrew and Arabic derive.43 (In fact, as in the case of Basque, there’s no consensus on what language family Sumerian does belong to.) But in general, the first decades of archaeological work in the region, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, confirmed an expected association of ancient Mesopotamia with empire and monarchy. The Sumerians, at least on first sighting, seemed no exception.44 In fact, they set the tone. Such was public interest in the findings from Ur that in the 1920s the Illustrated London News (England’s ‘window on the world’) devoted no less than thirty feature articles to Leonard Woolley’s excavation of the Royal Tombs.
还有更大的惊喜。最古老的城市和王国的遗迹 —— 包括乌尔的皇家陵墓 —— 属于一种以前不为人知的文化,在圣经中也没有提到:苏美尔人,他们使用的语言与希伯来语和阿拉伯语所来自的闪米特语系无关。43(事实上,就像巴斯克语的情况一样,对于苏美尔语属于哪个语系并没有达成共识。)但总的来说,从 19 世纪末到 20 世纪初,该地区最初几十年的考古工作证实了古代美索不达米亚与帝国和君主制的预期联系。苏美尔人,至少在第一眼看到时,似乎也不例外。44事实上,他们定下了基调。公众对乌尔的发现如此感兴趣,以至于在 20 世纪 20 年代,《伦敦新闻画报》(英国的 “世界之窗”)用了不少于 30 篇专题文章来报道伦纳德·伍利对皇家陵墓的发掘。
All this reinforced a popular picture of Mesopotamia as a civilization of cities, monarchy and aristocracy, all tinged with the excitement of uncovering the ‘truth’ behind biblical scripture (‘Ur of the Chaldees,’ as well as being a Sumerian city, appears in the Hebrew Bible as the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham). But one of the major accomplishments of modern archaeology and epigraphy has been to redraw this picture entirely: to show that Mesopotamia was never, in fact, an eternal ‘land of kings’. The real story is far more complicated.
所有这些都强化了美索不达米亚作为城市、君主和贵族文明的流行图景,所有这些都带有发现圣经经文背后的 “真相” 的兴奋感(“迦勒底的吾珥” 除了是苏美尔人的城市外,还作为族长亚伯拉罕的出生地出现在希伯来文圣经中)。但是,现代考古学和书信学的主要成就之一是完全重绘了这幅图画:表明美索不达米亚实际上从来不是一个永恒的 “王者之乡”。真正的故事要复杂得多。
The earliest Mesopotamian cities – those of the fourth and early third millennia BC – present no clear evidence for monarchy at all. Now, you might object, it’s difficult to prove for certain that something isn’t there. However, we know what evidence for monarchy in such cities would be like, because half a millennium later (from around 2800 BC onwards) monarchy starts popping up everywhere: palaces, aristocratic burials and royal inscriptions, along with defensive walls for cities and organized militia to guard them. But the birth of cities, and with it the basic elements of Mesopotamian civic life – the ancient building blocks of its urban society – begin considerably before this ‘Early Dynastic’ period.
最早的美索不达米亚城市 —— 公元前四千年和三千年早期的城市 —— 根本没有呈现出君主制的明确证据。现在,你可能会反对,很难肯定地证明某些东西不存在。然而,我们知道在这样的城市中君主制的证据会是什么样的,因为半千年后(大约从公元前 2800 年开始)君主制开始到处出现:宫殿、贵族墓葬和皇家碑文,以及城市的防御墙和有组织的民兵来保卫它们。但是,城市的诞生,以及美索不达米亚公民生活的基本要素 —— 城市社会的古老基石 —— 开始于这个 “早期王朝” 时期。
These original urban elements include some which have been wrongly characterized as inventions of royal statecraft, such as the institution that historians call by the French term corvée. This refers to obligatory labour on civic projects exacted from free citizens on a seasonal basis, and it has always been assumed to be a form of tax extracted by powerful rulers: taxes paid not in goods, but in services. From a Mesopotamian perspective, though, corvée was already very ancient. As old as humanity itself. The flood-myth Atrahasis – the prototype for the Old Testament story of Noah – tells how the gods first created people to perform corvée on their behalf. Mesopotamian gods were unusually hands-on, and had originally worked themselves. Eventually tiring of digging irrigation canals, they created minor deities to do the work, but they too rebelled, and – receiving a much more favourable hearing than Lucifer would in Heaven – the gods conceded to their demands and created people.45
这些原始的城市元素包括一些被错误地定性为皇家国策的发明,例如历史学家称之为 “徭役” 的制度。这指的是按季节要求自由公民在公民项目上的义务劳动,它一直被认为是强大的统治者征收的一种税收形式:税收不是以商品,而是以服务形式支付。不过,从美索不达米亚的角度来看,徭役已经非常古老。就像人类本身一样古老。洪水神话 Atrahasis —— 《旧约》中诺亚故事的原型 —— 讲述了众神如何首先创造了人,代表他们进行徭役。美索不达米亚的神灵异常亲力亲为,而且最初是自己工作。最终,他们厌倦了挖掘灌溉渠,创造了一些小神来做这些工作,但他们也反叛了,而且 —— 得到了比路西法在天堂更有利的听证会 —— 众神向他们的要求让步并创造了人。45
Everyone had to do corvée. Even the most powerful Mesopotamian rulers of later periods had to heave a basket of clay to the construction site of an important temple. The Sumerian word for corvée (dubsig) refers to this basket of earth, written with a pictogram showing a person lifting it on to their head, like kings do on monuments such as the Plaque of Ur-Nanshe, carved around 2500 BC . Free citizens performed dubsig for weeks or even months. When they did, high-ranking clerics and administrators worked alongside artisans, shepherds and cereal farmers. Later kings could grant exemptions, allowing the rich to pay tax in lieu, or employ others to do the work for them. Still, all contributed in some way.46
每个人都必须做徭役。即使是后期最强大的美索不达米亚统治者也必须把一篮子泥土搬到重要的寺庙的建筑工地上。苏美尔语中的 corvée(dubsig)指的是这种土篮子,用象形文字写着一个人把土篮子举到头上,就像国王在公元前 2500 年左右雕刻的 Ur-Nanshe Plaque 等纪念碑上那样。自由的公民在数周甚至数月内进行杜布西格。当他们这样做时,高级神职人员和行政人员与工匠、牧羊人和种粮人一起工作。后来的国王可以给予豁免,允许富人代替他们交税,或者雇用其他人为他们工作。尽管如此,所有人都以某种方式做出了贡献。46
Royal hymns describe the ‘happy faces’ and ‘joyous hearts’ of corvée workers. No doubt there’s an element of propaganda here, but it’s clear that, even in periods of monarchy and empire, these seasonal projects were undertaken in a festive spirit, labourers receiving copious rewards of bread, beer, dates, cheese and meat. There was also something of the carnival about them. They were occasions when the moral order of the city spun on its axis, and distinctions between citizens dissolved away. The ‘Hymns of Gudea’ – the governor (ensi) of the city-state of Lagash – convey something of the atmosphere in which they took place. Dating from around the end of the third millennium BC, they eulogize the restoration of a temple called Eninnu, the House of Ningirsu, patron deity of the city:
皇家赞美诗描述了徭役工人的 “快乐的脸” 和 “快乐的心”。毫无疑问,这里有宣传的成分,但很明显,即使在君主制和帝国时期,这些季节性项目也是以节日的精神进行的,劳动者得到了大量的面包、啤酒、枣、奶酪和肉的奖励。这些工程也有一些狂欢节的成分。在这些活动中,城市的道德秩序,公民之间的区别也随之消失。Gudea 的赞美诗 “ —— 拉加什城邦的总督(ensi) —— 传达了他们发生的一些气氛。大约在公元前三千年末,这些颂歌讴歌了一座名为Eninnu的寺庙的恢复,该寺庙是城市的守护神 Ningirsu 之家:
Women did not carry baskets,
妇女不提篮子,
only the top warriors did the building
只有最高级的战士做了建筑
for him; the whip did not strike;
对他来说,鞭子没有打到;
mother did not hit her (disobedient) child;
母亲没有打她(不听话的)孩子;
The general,
将军,
The colonel,
上校,
The captain,
队长,
(and) the conscript,
(和)应征者,
they (all) shared the work equally;
他们(都)平等地分担工作;
the supervision indeed was (like)
监督确实是(像)的
soft wool in their hands.47
他们手中的柔软羊毛。47
More lasting benefits for the citizenry at large included debt cancellation by the governor.48 Times of labour mobilization were thus seen as moments of absolute equality before the gods – when even slaves might be placed on an equal footing to their masters – as well as times when the imaginary city became real, as its inhabitants shed their day-to-day identities as bakers or tavern keepers or inhabitants of such and such a neighbourhood, or later generals or slaves, and briefly assembled to become ‘the people’ of Lagash, or Kish, Eridu, or Larsa as they built or rebuilt some part of the city or the network of irrigation canals that sustained it.
对广大市民来说,更持久的好处包括由总督取消债务。48因此,劳动动员的时代被视为神灵面前绝对平等的时刻 —— 即使是奴隶也可能被置于与主人平等的地位 —— 同时也是想象中的城市成为现实的时刻。它的居民摆脱了他们作为面包师或酒馆老板或这样那样的街区居民的日常身份,或后来的将军或奴隶的身份,短暂地集合起来成为拉加什、基什、埃里杜或拉尔萨的 “人民”,他们建造或重建城市的某些部分或支撑城市的灌溉渠网络。
If this is at least partly how cities were built, it’s hard to write such festivals off as pure symbolic display. What’s more, there were other institutions, also said to originate in the Predynastic age, which ensured that ordinary citizens had a significant hand in government. Even the most autocratic rulers of later city-states were answerable to a panoply of town councils, neighbourhood wards and assemblies – in all of which women often participated alongside men.49 The ‘sons and daughters’ of a city could make their voices heard, influencing everything from taxation to foreign policy. These urban assemblies might not have been so powerful as those of ancient Greece – but, on the other hand, slavery was not nearly so developed in Mesopotamia, and women were not excluded from politics to anything like the same degree.50 In diplomatic correspondence, we also catch occasional glimpses of corporate bodies rising up against unpopular rulers or policies, often successfully.
如果这至少在一定程度上是城市建设的方式,就很难把这种节日写成纯粹的象征性展示。更重要的是,还有其他一些机构,据说也起源于前王朝时代,这些机构确保了普通公民在政府中的重要地位。即使是后来城邦中最专制的统治者也要对一系列的市政委员会、邻里委员会和议会负责 —— 在所有这些机构中,妇女往往与男子一起参与。49一个城市的 “儿女们” 可以发出自己的声音,影响从税收到外交政策的一切。这些城市议会可能没有古希腊的议会那么强大 —— 但另一方面,美索不达米亚的奴隶制也没有那么发达,妇女被排除在政治之外的程度也不尽相同。50在外交信函中,我们还能偶尔瞥见法人团体起来反对不受欢迎的统治者或政策,而且往往很成功。
The term used by modern scholars for this general state of affairs is ‘primitive democracy’. It’s not a very good term, since there’s no particular reason to think any of these institutions were in any way crude or unsophisticated. Arguably, the continued use of this odd term by researchers has inhibited wider discussion, which remains mostly confined to the specialist field of Assyriology: the study of ancient Mesopotamia and its written legacy in the cuneiform script. Let’s take a closer look at the argument, and some of its implications.
现代学者对这种普遍状况使用的术语是 “原始民主”。这不是一个很好的术语,因为没有特别的理由认为这些机构在任何方面都是粗糙的或不成熟的。可以说,研究人员继续使用这个奇怪的术语抑制了更广泛的讨论,这些讨论大多局限于亚述学的专业领域:研究古代美索不达米亚及其楔形文字的书面遗产。让我们仔细看看这个论点,以及它的一些影响。
The idea that Mesopotamia possessed a ‘primitive democracy’ was first advanced in the 1940s by Thorkild Jacobsen, the Danish historian and Assyriologist.51 Today, scholars in that field have extended his idea even further. District councils and assemblies of elders – representing the interests of urban publics – were not just a feature of the earliest Mesopotamian cities, as Jacobsen thought; there is evidence for them in all later periods of Mesopotamian history too, right down to the time of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian Empires, whose memory lived on through biblical scripture.
美索不达米亚拥有 “原始民主” 的想法是由丹麦历史学家和亚述学家托基尔德·雅各布森在 1940 年代首次提出的。51今天,该领域的学者们将他的想法进一步延伸。区议会和长老大会 —— 代表城市公众的利益 —— 并不像雅各布森认为的那样只是美索不达米亚最早的城市的特征;在美索不达米亚历史的所有后期都有证据,直到亚述、巴比伦和波斯帝国时期,这些帝国的记忆通过《圣经》的经文得以延续。
Popular councils and citizen assemblies (Sumerian: ukkin; Akkadian: puhrum) were stable features of government, not just in Mesopotamian cities, but also their colonial offshoots (like the Old Assyrian karum of Kanesh, in Anatolia), and in the urban societies of neighbouring peoples such as the Hittites, Phoenicians, Philistines and Israelites.52 In fact, it is almost impossible to find a city anywhere in the ancient Near East that did not have some equivalent to a popular assembly – or often several assemblies (for instance, different ones representing the interests of ‘the young’ and ‘the old’). This was the case even in areas such as the Syrian steppe and northern Mesopotamia, where traditions of monarchy ran deep.53 Still, we know very little about how these assemblies functioned, their composition, or often even where they met.54 Likely as not, an ancient Greek observer might have described some of them as democratic, others oligarchic, still others as a mix of democratic, oligarchic and monarchic principles. But for the most part, experts can only guess.
人民议会和公民大会(苏美尔语:ukkin;阿卡德语:puhrum)是政府的稳定特征,不仅在美索不达米亚的城市,而且在其殖民地的分支(如安纳托利亚的旧亚述karum),以及邻近民族的城市社会中,如赫梯人、腓尼基人、非利士人和以色列人。52事实上,在古代近东的任何地方,几乎不可能找到一个没有某种类似于人民大会的城市 —— 或者往往有几个大会(例如,代表 “年轻人” 和 “老年人” 利益的不同大会)。即使在叙利亚草原和美索不达米亚北部等君主制传统深厚的地区,情况也是如此。53尽管如此,我们对这些议会如何运作、其组成、甚至它们经常在哪里开会所知甚少。54一个古希腊的观察家可能会将其中一些描述为民主的,另一些是寡头的,还有一些是民主、寡头和君主原则的混合。但在大多数情况下,专家们只能猜测。
Some of the clearest evidence comes from between the ninth and seventh centuries BC . Assyrian emperors like Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal have been famous since biblical times for their brutality, creating monuments that boasted of the bloody vengeance they carried out against rebels. But when dealing with loyal subjects they were strikingly hands-off, often granting near-total autonomy to citizen bodies that made decisions collectively.55 We know this because governors stationed far from the Assyrian court, in southern Mesopotamia’s major cities – Babylon, Nippur, Uruk, Ur, and so on – sent letters to their overlords. Many of these were letters recovered by archaeologists during the excavation of royal archives at the ancient imperial capital of Nineveh. In them, city governors relay information to the Assyrian court about decisions made by civic councils. We learn the ‘will of the people’ on matters ranging from foreign policy to the election of governors; also, that citizen bodies sometimes took matters into their own hands, raising soldiers or taxes to support civic projects, and playing their overlords off against each other.
一些最清晰的证据来自于公元前九世纪和七世纪之间。自圣经时代以来,像西纳赫里布和阿舒尔巴尼帕这样的亚述皇帝一直因其残暴而闻名,他们创造的纪念碑吹嘘他们对叛乱者进行的血腥报复。但在对待忠诚的臣民时,他们却明显地不闻不问,往往将近乎完全的自治权授予集体决策的公民机构。55我们之所以知道这一点,是因为驻扎在远离亚述宫廷的美索不达米亚南部主要城市 —— 巴比伦、尼普尔、乌鲁克、乌尔等地的总督们给他们的统治者写信。其中许多是考古学家在尼尼微古帝国首都挖掘皇家档案时发现的信件。在这些信件中,城市总督向亚述朝廷转达了关于公民议会所做决定的信息。我们了解到从外交政策到总督选举等问题上的 “人民的意愿”;此外,公民机构有时会自行处理问题,筹集士兵或税收来支持公民项目,并将他们的霸主互相牵制。
Neighbourhood wards (Akkadian: bābtum, after the word for ‘gate’) were active in local administration, and sometimes appear to have replicated certain aspects of village or tribal governance in an urban setting.56 Murder trials, divorce and property disputes seem to have been mostly in the hands of town councils. Texts found at Nippur give unusual details about the composition of one such assembly, summoned to act as a jury for a homicide case. Among those sitting we find one bird catcher, one potter, two gardeners and a soldier in the service of a temple. The Trinidadian intellectual C. L. R. James once said of fifth-century Athens that ‘every cook can govern’. In Mesopotamia, or at least in many parts of it, it seems this was literally true: being a manual labourer did not exclude one from direct participation in law and politics.57
邻里区(阿卡德语:bābtum,取自 “门” 的意思)在地方行政中很活跃,有时似乎在城市环境中复制了村庄或部落治理的某些方面。56谋杀案的审判、离婚和财产纠纷似乎主要由城镇委员会负责。在尼普尔发现的文本提供了关于一个这样的议会的组成的不寻常的细节,该议会被召集来作为一个杀人案件的陪审团。在这些人中,我们发现一个捕鸟人、一个陶工、两个园丁和一个为神庙服务的士兵。特立尼达的知识分子 C·L.R·詹姆斯曾经对五世纪的雅典说过,“每个厨师都可以治理”。在美索不达米亚,或者至少在美索不达米亚的许多地方,这似乎是真的:作为一个体力劳动者,并不排除直接参与法律和政治。57
Participatory government in ancient Mesopotamian cities was organized at multiple levels, from wards – sometimes defined on ethnic lines or in terms of professional affiliations – up to larger urban districts, and ultimately the city as a whole. The interests of individual citizens might be represented at every tier, but the surviving written evidence contains frustratingly few details about how this system of urban government worked in practice. Historians attribute this lack of information to the key role of assemblies, operating at various scales, and conducting their deliberations (about local property disputes, divorce and inheritance cases, accusations of theft or murder, and so on) in ways that were largely independent of central government and did not require its written authorization.58
古代美索不达米亚城市的参与式政府是在多个层面上组织起来的,从区 —— 有时按种族或职业关系来界定 —— 到更大的城市区域,最终到整个城市,都是如此。公民个人的利益可能在每一层都有代表,但现存的书面证据中关于这种城市政府系统如何实际运作的细节少得令人沮丧。历史学家将这种信息的缺乏归因于议会的关键作用,它们在不同的规模上运作,并以基本上独立于中央政府的方式进行审议(关于地方财产纠纷、离婚和继承案件、盗窃或谋杀的指控等等),不需要中央政府的书面授权。58
Archaeologists find themselves in general agreement with the historians, although one might reasonably ask how archaeology can shed independent light on such political matters. One answer comes from the site of Mashkan-shapir, an important centre under the kings of Larsa, around 2000 BC . As with most Mesopotamian cities, the urban landscape of Mashkan-shapir was dominated by its main temple – in this case, the sanctuary of Nergal, god of the underworld – raised up high on a ziggurat platform; but intensive archaeological survey of the city’s harbour, gateways and residential districts revealed a strikingly even distribution of wealth, craft production and administrative tools across the five main districts, with no obvious centre of commercial or political power.59 In terms of day-to-day affairs, city dwellers (even under monarchies) largely governed themselves, presumably much as they had before kings appeared on the scene to begin with.
考古学家发现他们与历史学家的观点基本一致,尽管人们有理由问,考古学如何能对这种政治问题进行独立的说明。一个答案来自于 Mashkan-shapir 遗址,这是公元前 2000 年左右拉尔萨国王时期的一个重要中心。与大多数美索不达米亚城市一样,Mashkan-shapir 的城市景观由其主要的神庙主导 —— 在这种情况下,是冥界之神 Nergal 的圣殿 —— 高高耸立在一个金字塔平台上;但对城市的港口、门路和住宅区的密集考古调查显示,财富、工艺生产和行政工具在五个主要地区的分布惊人地均匀,没有明显的商业或政治权力中心。59就日常事务而言,城市居民(即使是在君主制下)基本上是自我管理的,大概与国王出现之前的情况差不多。
Things could work the other way round. Sometimes, the arrival of an authoritarian ruler from outside the city sent urban life into reverse. Such was the case with the Amorite Dynasty of the Lims – Yaggid-Lim, Yahudun-Lim and Zimri-Lim – which conquered much of the Syrian Euphrates around the same time Mashkan-shapir was thriving far to the south. The Lims decided to set up their centre of operations in the ancient city called Mari (modern Tell Hariri, on the Syrian Euphrates), and occupied government buildings in its heart. Their arrival seems to have precipitated a mass exodus of Mari’s urban population, who left to join up with smaller townships or tent-dwelling herders scattered across the Syrian steppe. Before the sack of Mari by Hammurabi of Babylon in 1761 BC, the last ‘city’ of the Amorite kings comprised little more than the royal residence, harem, attached temples and a handful of other official buildings.60
事情可以反过来进行。有时,一个来自城市之外的专制统治者的到来会使城市生活陷入困境。亚摩利人的林姆王朝就是这种情况 —— 亚吉德·林姆、亚胡顿·林姆和齐米里·林姆 —— -在马什坎·沙皮尔向南远处繁荣的同时,征服了叙利亚幼发拉底河的大部分地区。林姆人决定将他们的行动中心设在名为马里(今叙利亚幼发拉底河畔的泰勒哈里里)的古城,并占领了古城中心的政府大楼。他们的到来似乎引发了马里城市人口的大逃亡,他们离开后与散布在叙利亚草原上的小城镇或住在帐篷里的牧民汇合。在公元前 1761 年巴比伦的汉谟拉比洗劫马里之前,亚摩利人国王的最后一座 “城市” 除了王宫、后宫、附属的寺庙和少量其他官方建筑之外,几乎没有其他东西。60
Written correspondence of this period offers direct evidence of antipathy between arriviste monarchy of this kind and the established power of urban assemblies. Letters to Zimri-Lim from Terru – lord of the ancient Hurrian capital of Urkesh (modern Tell Mozan) – convey his impotence in the face of the city’s councils and assemblies. On one occasion, Terru tells Zimri-Lim: ‘Because I am submitted to my lord’s pleasure, the inhabitants of my town despise me, and two and three times I have snatched my head back from death by their hand.’ To which the Mari king responds: ‘I did not realize that the inhabitants of your town despised you on account of me. You belong to me even if the town of Urkesh belongs to someone else.’ All this came to a head when Terru confessed he had to flee from public opinion (‘the mouth of Urkesh’), taking refuge in a nearby town.61
这一时期的书面信件提供了直接证据,表明,这种抵达的君主制与城市议会的既定权力之间的反感。古代胡里安人的首都乌尔克什(今 Tell Mozan)的领主特鲁给 Zimri-Lim 的信中表达了他在面对城市的议会和集会时的无能为力。有一次,Terru 告诉 Zimri-Lim:“因为我服从于我的主人的意愿,所以我镇上的居民都鄙视我,有两三次我从他们手中抢回了我的头。对此,马里国王回答说 “我没有意识到,你镇上的居民因为我而轻视你。即使乌克什镇属于别人,你也属于我。” 当特鲁承认他不得不逃离公众舆论(“乌尔克什之口”),在附近的一个城镇避难时,所有这一切都变成了事实。61
So, far from needing rulers to manage urban life, it seems most Mesopotamian urbanites were organized into autonomous self-governing units, which might react to offensive overlords either by driving them out or by abandoning the city entirely. None of this necessarily answers the question, ‘what was the nature of government in Mesopotamian cities before the appearance of kingship?’ (though it’s certainly suggestive). Instead, the answers depend to a slightly alarming degree on discoveries from a single site: the city of Uruk – modern Warka, biblical Erech – whose later mythology inspired Jacobsen’s original search for ‘primitive democracy’.62
因此,美索不达米亚的城市居民远不需要统治者来管理城市生活,似乎大多数城市居民都被组织成自主的自治单位,他们可能对进攻性的霸主做出反应,要么把他们赶走,要么完全放弃城市。这些都不一定能回答 “在王权出现之前,美索不达米亚城市的政府性质是什么” 这个问题。(虽然它肯定是暗示性的。)相反,这些答案在某种程度上取决于一个单一地点的发现:乌鲁克城 —— 现代的瓦尔卡,圣经中的埃里希 —— 它后来的神话启发了雅各布森最初对 “原始民主” 的探索。62
At 3300 BC, Uruk was a city of around 200 hectares, dwarfing her neighbours on the southern Mesopotamian floodplain. Estimates of Uruk’s population at this time range widely, between 20,000 and 50,000. The first residential quarters are built over by later urban settlement, which continued down to the time of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC .63 Cuneiform script may well have been invented at Uruk, around 3300 BC, and we can see its early stages of development in numerical tablets and other forms of administrative notation. Bookkeeping in the city’s temples was writing’s main function at that point.64 Thousands of years later, it was also in the temples of Uruk that cuneiform script finally passed into obsolescence, by which time it had been elaborated to record, among other things, the world’s earliest written literature and law codes.
在公元前 3300 年,乌鲁克是一座占地约 200 公顷的城市,使她在美索不达米亚南部洪泛区的邻居们相形见绌。对乌鲁克此时人口的估计范围很广,在 20,000 到 50,000 之间。最初的住宅区被后来的城市定居点所覆盖,这种情况一直持续到公元前四世纪的亚历山大大帝时期。63楔形文字很可能是在乌鲁克发明的,大约在公元前 3300 年,我们可以在数字板和其他形式的行政符号中看到它的早期发展阶段。在城市的神庙中记账是当时文字的主要功能。64几千年后,也是在乌鲁克的神庙里,楔形文字最终进入了淘汰期,那时它已经被精心设计,记录了世界上最早的书面文学和法律典籍。
What do we know about the original city of Uruk? By the late fourth millennium BC it had a high acropolis, much of which was taken up by the raised public district called Eanna, ‘House of Heaven’, dedicated to the Goddess Inanna. On its summit stood nine monumental buildings, of which only the foundations of imported limestone survive, together with bits of stairwells and fragments of columned halls decorated with coloured mosaic. The roofs of these broad civic structures must originally have been constructed of exotic timbers, brought by river barge from the ‘Cedar Forest’ of Syria, which form the backdrop to the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh.
我们对最初的乌鲁克城了解多少?公元前四千年晚期,它有一个高高的卫城,其中大部分被称为 Eanna 的高架公共区所占据,即 “天堂之家”,供奉着伊南娜女神。在山顶上有九座纪念性建筑,其中只有进口石灰岩的地基幸存下来,还有一些楼梯和用彩色马赛克装饰的圆柱大厅的碎片。这些宽阔的市政建筑的屋顶最初一定是用异国情调的木材建造的,这些木材由河上的驳船从叙利亚的 “雪松森林” 运来,构成了美索不达米亚史诗《吉尔伽美什》中的背景。
For the urban historian, Uruk remains something of a strange fruit. A bit like a Ukrainian mega-site in reverse, its oldest known architectural layout is all core with no surrounding flesh, since we know almost nothing of the residential districts beyond the Eanna precinct, which were ignored by early excavators at the site. In other words, we glimpse something of the city’s public sector, but as yet we have no private sector against which to define it. Still, let’s press on with what we do know.
对于城市历史学家来说,乌鲁克仍然是一种奇怪的果实。这有点像乌克兰的大型遗址,它最古老的建筑布局都是核心区,没有周围的肉体,因为我们对 Eanna 区以外的住宅区几乎一无所知,这些住宅区被遗址的早期发掘者忽略了。换句话说,我们瞥见了这个城市的公共部分,但我们还没有私人部分来定义它。尽管如此,我们还是要继续了解我们所知道的情况。
Most of these public buildings seem to have been great communal assembly halls, clearly modelled on the plan of ordinary households, but constructed as houses of the gods.65 There was also a Great Court comprising an enormous sunken plaza, 165 feet across, entirely surrounded by two tiers of benches and equipped with water channels to feed trees and gardens, which offered much-needed shade for open-air gatherings. This sort of arrangement – a series of magnificent, open temples accompanied by a congenial space for public meetings – is exactly what one might expect were Uruk to have been governed by a popular assembly; and, as Jacobsen emphasized, the Gilgamesh epic (which begins in Predynastic Uruk) does speak of such assemblies, including one reserved for the young men of the city.
这些公共建筑中的大多数似乎都是巨大的公共集会厅,显然是仿照普通家庭的计划建造的,但又是作为神灵的居所。65还有一个大法庭,包括一个巨大的下沉式广场,宽 165 英尺,完全由两层长椅环绕,并配备了水渠,为树木和花园供水,为露天集会提供急需的树荫。这种安排 —— 一系列宏伟的、开放的寺庙伴随着一个适合公众集会的空间 —— 正是人们所期望的,如果乌鲁克是由民众大会管理的话;而且,正如雅各布森所强调的,吉尔伽美什史诗(始于上古时期的乌鲁克)确实谈到了这种集会,包括为该城市的年轻人保留的集会。
To draw an obvious parallel: the Athenian agora in the time of Pericles (the fifth century BC ) was also full of public temples, but the actual democratic assemblies took place in an open space called the Pnyx, a low hill equipped with seating for the Council of Five Hundred citizens, appointed – by sortition, with rotating membership – to run the everyday affairs of the city (all other citizens were expected to stand). Meetings at the Pnyx could involve anywhere between 6,000 and 12,000 people, groups comprising free adult males drawn from perhaps 20 per cent of the city’s total population. The Great Court at Uruk is considerably larger, and while we have little idea what the total population of Uruk was in, say, 3500 BC, it’s hard to imagine it was anywhere near that of classical Athens. This suggests a wider range of participation, which would make sense if women were not entirely excluded and if early Uruk did not, like later Athens, define some 30 per cent of its population as resident aliens with no voting rights, and up to 40 per cent as slaves.
举个明显的例子:在 Pericles 的时代(公元前五世纪),雅典的 agora 也充满了公共庙宇,但实际的民主集会是在一个叫做 Pnyx 的空地上进行的,这个低矮的山丘上有五百人委员会的座位,通过选拔,轮流担任成员,负责管理城市的日常事务(所有其他公民都应该站着)。在 Pnyx 举行的会议可能有 6000 到 12000 人参加,这些团体由自由的成年男性组成,大约占城市总人口的 20%。乌鲁克的大法庭要大得多,虽然我们不知道公元前 3500 年乌鲁克的总人口是多少,但很难想象它与古典雅典的人口相差无几。这表明参与的范围更广,如果妇女没有被完全排除在外,如果早期的乌鲁克没有像后来的雅典一样,将大约 30% 的人口定义为没有投票权的外来居民,以及高达 40% 的奴隶,这就说得通了。
Much of this remains speculative, but what’s clear is that in later periods things change. Around 3200 BC the original public buildings of the Eanna sanctuary were razed and covered with debris, and its sacred landscape redesigned around a series of gated courts and ziggurats. By 2900 BC, we have evidence for local kings of rival city-states battling it out for supremacy over Uruk, in response to which a five-and-a-half-mile fortification wall (whose building was later attributed to Gilgamesh) went up around the city’s perimeter. Within a few centuries, city rulers were setting themselves up as neighbours of the goddesses and the gods, building their own palatial houses on the doorstep to the House of Heaven and stamping their names into its sacred brickwork.66
这其中的大部分仍然是推测性的,但清楚的是,在后来的时期,事情发生了变化。大约在公元前 3200 年,埃纳圣地原有的公共建筑被夷为平地,并被瓦砾覆盖,其神圣的景观被重新设计,围绕着一系列有门的庭院和齐格隆大殿。到了公元前 2900 年,我们有证据表明敌对城邦的当地国王为争夺乌鲁克的统治权而争斗,为此,在城市周边建立了五英里半的防御墙(后来被认为是吉尔伽美什建造的)。在几个世纪内,城市的统治者将自己设定为女神和诸神的邻居,在天国之家门口建造自己的宫殿式房屋,并将自己的名字印在神圣的砖瓦上。66
Once again, while evidence of democratic self-governance is always a bit ambiguous (would anyone guess what was really going on in fifth-century Athens, from archaeological evidence alone?), evidence for royal rule, when it appears, is entirely unmistakable.
再次,虽然民主自治的证据总是有点含糊不清(仅从考古证据来看,有人会猜到五世纪的雅典到底发生了什么吗?),但王室统治的证据,一旦出现,就完全无误了。
What Uruk is really famous for is writing. It is the first city for which we have extensive written records, and some of these documents do date back to the period before royal rule. Unfortunately, while they can be read, they are also extremely difficult to interpret.
乌鲁克真正著名的是写作。它是我们有大量书面记录的第一个城市,其中一些文件确实可以追溯到王室统治之前的时期。不幸的是,虽然它们可以被阅读,但它们也极难解释。
Most are cuneiform tablets recovered from trash dumps dug into the foundations of the acropolis, and they appear to provide only a very narrow window on to city life. The great majority are bureaucratic receipts, recording transactions of goods and services. There are also ‘school texts’ which comprise sign-lists, copied out by scribes in training to familiarize them with the standard administrative lexicon of the time. The historical value of the latter is unclear, because scribes may have had to learn to write all kinds of cuneiform signs – which were executed by pressing a reed stylus into moist clay – that had little application in practice. Such learning may well have been part of what was considered a proper literate training at the time.67
大多数是在卫城的地基上挖出的垃圾堆中找到的楔形文字片,它们似乎只提供了一个非常狭窄的城市生活窗口。绝大多数是官僚收据,记录货物和服务的交易。还有一些 “学校文本”,包括符号清单,由文士在训练中抄写,以使他们熟悉当时的标准行政词汇。后者的历史价值尚不清楚,因为文士们可能不得不学习书写各种楔形文字符号 —— 这些符号是通过将芦苇手写笔压入潮湿的泥土中来完成的 —— 但在实践中却没有什么应用。这种学习很可能是当时被认为是适当的识字训练的一部分。67
Still, the mere existence of a college of scribes administering complicated relations between people, animals and things shows us there was much more going on in the large ‘houses of the gods’ than just ritual gatherings. There were goods and industries to be administered, and a body of citizens who developed pedagogical techniques that quickly became so essential to this particular form of urban life that they remain with us to this day. To get a sense of how pervasive some of these innovations were, consider that just about anyone reading this book is likely to have first learned to read in classrooms, sitting in rows opposite a teacher, who follows a standard curriculum. This rather stern way of learning was itself a Sumerian invention, one now to be found in virtually every corner of our world.68
不过,仅仅是一个管理人、动物和事物之间复杂关系的文士学院的存在,就向我们表明,在大型的 “神之屋” 里发生的事情远不止是仪式性的聚会。有商品和产业需要管理,还有一群公民开发了教育技术,这些技术很快就成为这种特殊形式的城市生活所必需的,直到今天还在我们身边。为了了解其中一些创新是多么普遍,请考虑一下,几乎所有读这本书的人都可能是在教室里第一次学习阅读,坐在老师对面的一排,老师按照标准课程进行教学。这种相当严厉的学习方式本身就是苏美尔人的发明,现在几乎在我们世界的每个角落都能找到。68
So what do we know about these houses of the gods? For one thing, it is clear that in many ways they resembled factories more than churches. Even the earliest for which there is evidence had considerable amounts of human labour at their disposal, along with workshops and stockpiles of raw materials. Some details of the way these Sumerian temples organized themselves are still with us, including the quantification of human labour into standard workloads and units of time. Sumerian officials counted all sorts of things – including days, months and years – using a sexagesimal (base-60) system from which ultimately derives (via many and varied pathways of transmission) our own system of time-reckoning.69 In their bookkeeping records we find the ancient seedbeds of modern industrialism, finance and bureaucracy.
那么,我们对这些神明的房子了解多少呢?首先,很明显,在许多方面,它们更像工厂,而不是教堂。即使是有证据的最早的神庙,也有大量的人力可供支配,还有车间和原材料的储存。这些苏美尔神庙的组织方式的一些细节仍在我们身边,包括将人类劳动量化为标准的工作量和时间单位。苏美尔官员使用六进制(base-60)系统计算各种事物 —— 包括日、月和年 —— 最终从该系统中衍生出我们自己的时间计算系统(通过许多不同的传播途径)。69在他们的记账记录中,我们发现了现代工业化、金融和官僚机构的古老苗头。
It is often hard to determine exactly who these temple labourers were, or even what sort of people were being organized in this way, allotted meals and having their outputs inventoried – were they permanently attached to the temple, or just ordinary citizens fulfilling their annual corvée duty? – but the presence of children in the lists suggests at least some may have lived there. If so, then this was most likely because they had nowhere else to go. If later Sumerian temples are anything to go by, this workforce will have comprised a whole assortment of the urban needy: widows, orphans and others rendered vulnerable by debt, crime, conflict, poverty, disease or disability, who found in the temple a place of refuge and support.70
通常很难确定这些寺庙劳工到底是谁,甚至很难确定什么样的人以这种方式被组织起来,并清点他们的产出 —— 他们是长期隶属于寺庙,还是只是履行年度徭役义务的普通公民?- 但名单中出现的儿童表明至少有一些人可能住在那里。如果是这样,那么这很可能是因为他们没有地方可去。如果后来的苏美尔神庙有什么可以借鉴的地方,这些劳动力将包括城市中各种各样的穷人:寡妇、孤儿和其他因债务、犯罪、冲突、贫困、疾病或残疾而变得脆弱的人,他们在神庙中找到了一个避难和支持的地方。70
For the time being, though, let us just emphasize the remarkable number of industries that developed in these temple workshops, as documented in the cuneiform accounts. Among them we find the first large-scale dairy and wool production; also the manufacture of leavened bread, beer and wine, including facilities for standardized packaging. Some eighty varieties of fish – fresh- and saltwater – appear in the administrative accounts along with their associated oil and food products, preserved and stored in temple repositories. From this we can deduce that a primary economic function of this temple sector was to co-ordinate labour at key times of year, and to provide quality control for processed goods that differed from those made in ordinary households.71
不过,让我们暂时强调一下楔形文字记载的、在这些神庙作坊中发展起来的显著的工业数量。在这些行业中,我们发现了最早的大规模乳制品和羊毛生产;还有发面面包、啤酒和葡萄酒的生产,包括标准化的包装设施。约有八十种鱼 —— 淡水和咸水鱼 —— 与它们相关的油和食品一起出现在行政记述中,它们被保存并储存在神庙的仓库中。由此我们可以推断,这个寺庙部门的主要经济功能是在一年中的关键时期协调劳动力,并为不同于普通家庭的加工产品提供质量控制。71
This particular kind of work, unlike the maintenance of irrigation dykes and building of roads and embankments, was routinely carried out under central administrative control. In other words, in the early phases of Mesopotamian urban life, what we would ordinarily imagine as the state sector (e.g. public works, international relations) was managed largely by local or city-wide assemblies; while top-down bureaucratic procedures were limited to what we would now think of as the economic or commodity sphere.72
这种特殊的工作,与维护灌溉堤坝以及修建道路和堤坝不同,通常都是在中央行政控制下进行的。换句话说,在美索不达米亚城市生活的早期阶段,我们通常想象中的国家部门(如公共工程、国际关系)主要由地方或城市范围的议会管理;而自上而下的官僚程序仅限于我们现在认为的经济或商品领域。72
Of course, Uruk’s inhabitants didn’t have an explicit concept of ‘the economy’ – no one did until very recent times. For Sumerians, the ultimate purpose of all these factories and workshops was to provide the gods and goddesses of the city with an illustrious residence where they would receive offerings of food, fine clothing and care, which also meant servicing their cult and organizing their festivals. The latter activity was probably depicted on the Uruk Vase, one of the few surviving examples of narrative art from this early period, whose carved decoration shows a number of identical nude males parading behind one larger male figure to the temple precinct of the Goddess Inanna with their yield of field, orchard and flock.73
当然,乌鲁克的居民并没有明确的 “经济” 概念 —— 直到近代才有人这样做。对于苏美尔人来说,所有这些工厂和作坊的最终目的是为城市的诸神提供一个显赫的住所,在那里他们可以得到食物、精美的衣服和照顾,这也意味着为他们的崇拜提供服务并组织他们的节日。 后者的活动可能被描绘在乌鲁克花瓶上,这是这个早期时期为数不多的现存叙事艺术的例子之一,其雕刻装饰显示了一些相同的裸体男性在一个较大的男性形象后面游行,带着他们的田地、果园和羊群前往伊南娜女神的庙宇范围。73
It’s not entirely clear who the larger, leading male figure – or ‘Uruk man’, as he’s sometimes called in the literature – is supposed to be. According to the much later story of Gilgamesh, which is set in Uruk, one of the leaders of the youth assembly did manage to catapult himself into the position of lugal, or king – but if anything like this happened it left no trace in the written records of the fourth millennium BC, since lists of Uruk office holders have been found, dating to that time, and lugal is not among them. (The term only shows up much later, around 2600 BC, at a time when there are also palaces and other clear signs of royalty.) There is no reason to think that monarchy – ceremonial or otherwise – played any significant role in the earliest cities of southern Mesopotamia. Quite the opposite, in fact.74
我们并不完全清楚谁是更大的男性领导人物 —— 或 “乌鲁克人”,因为他有时在文献中被称为 —— 应该是。根据后来发生在乌鲁克的吉尔伽美什的故事,青年大会的一个领导人确实设法把自己推到了卢加尔(或国王)的位置上 —— 但如果发生了这样的事情,它在公元前四千年的书面记录中没有留下任何痕迹,因为已经发现了乌鲁克官员的名单,可以追溯到那个时候,卢加尔不在其中。(这个词只是在很晚的时候才出现,大约在公元前 2600 年,当时也有宫殿和其他明显的王室标志。)没有理由认为君主制 —— 不管是仪式上的还是其他方面的 —— 在美索不达米亚南部最早的城市中发挥了任何重要作用。事实上,恰恰相反。74
Yet it’s also clear that early inscriptions prise open only a very narrow window on urban life. We know something about the mass production of woollen garments and other commodities in temples; we can also infer that – somehow or other – these woollens and other temple manufactures were being traded for wood, metal and precious stone that were not available in the river valleys, but abounded in the surrounding high country. We know little about how this trade was organized in its earliest days, but we do know from archaeological evidence that Uruk was establishing colonies, tiny versions of itself, at many strategic points along the trade routes. Uruk colonies appear to have been both commercial outposts and religious centres, and traces of them are found as far north as the Taurus Mountains and as far east as the Iranian Zagros.75
然而,很明显,早期的铭文只为我们打开了一扇非常狭窄的城市生活之窗。我们知道一些关于在寺庙中大规模生产羊毛衫和其他商品的情况;我们也可以推断,这些羊毛衫和其他寺庙产品被用来换取木材、金属和宝石,而这些东西在河谷中是没有的,但在周围的高地却有很多。我们对这种贸易在早期是如何组织的知之甚少,但我们从考古学证据中得知,乌鲁克在贸易路线上的许多战略要点上建立了殖民地,即自己的小版本。乌鲁克的殖民地似乎既是商业前哨,又是宗教中心,其痕迹最北到金牛座山脉,最东到伊朗扎格罗斯都有发现。75
‘Uruk expansion’, as it is called in the archaeological literature, is puzzling. There’s no real evidence of violent conquest, no weapons or fortifications, yet at the same time there seems to have been an effort to transform – in effect, to colonize – the lives of nearby peoples, to disseminate the new habits of urban life. In this, the emissaries of Uruk seem to have proceeded with an almost missionary zeal. Temples were established, and with them new sorts of clothing, new dairy products, wines and woollens were disseminated to local populations. While these products might not have been entirely novel, what the temples introduced was the principle of standardization: urban temple-factories were literally outputting products in uniform packages, with the houses of the gods guaranteeing purity and quality control.76
“乌鲁克的扩张”,正如它在考古学文献中所说的那样,是令人困惑的。没有暴力征服的真正证据,没有武器或防御工事,但与此同时,似乎一直在努力改变 —— 实际上是殖民化 —— 附近人民的生活,传播城市生活的新习惯。在这方面,乌鲁克的使者似乎以一种几乎是传教士的热情来进行。寺庙被建立起来,新的服装、新的乳制品 、葡萄酒和羊毛衫也随之被传播给当地居民。虽然这些产品可能并不完全是新产品,但神庙引入的是标准化原则:城市的神庙工厂实际上是以统一的包装来生产产品,由神的宫殿来保证纯度和质量控制。76
The entire process was, in a sense, colonial, and it did not go unopposed. As it turns out, we cannot really understand the rise of what we have come to call ‘the state’ – and specifically of aristocracies and monarchies – except in the larger context of that counter-reaction.
从某种意义上说,整个过程都是殖民主义的,而且它并非没有遭到反对。事实证明,除了在这种反击的大背景下,我们无法真正理解我们称之为 “国家” 的崛起,特别是贵族和君主制的崛起。
Perhaps the most revealing site, in this respect, is called Arslantepe – the ‘Hill of the Lion’, in the Malatya Plain of eastern Turkey. Around the same time Uruk was becoming a large city, Arslantepe was coming into its own as a regional centre of some significance, where the upper reaches of the Euphrates arc towards the Anti-Taurus Mountains, with their rich sources of metal and timber. The site may have started life as some kind of seasonal trade fair; at nearly 3,300 feet above sea level, it was likely snowed in over the winter months. Even at its peak it was never larger than five hectares, and there were probably never more than a few hundred people actually living on the spot. Within those five hectares, however, archaeologists have unearthed evidence for a remarkable sequence of political developments.77
在这方面,最能说明问题的遗址也许是位于土耳其东部马拉提亚平原的阿尔斯兰特佩 —— “狮子山”。大约在乌鲁克成为大城市的同时,阿尔斯兰特佩也开始成为一个具有一定意义的地区中心,幼发拉底河的上游向安提塔罗斯山脉延伸,那里有丰富的金属和木材资源。该遗址开始时可能是某种季节性贸易集市;在海拔近 3300 英尺的地方,它可能在冬季被雪覆盖。即使在它的高峰期,它也从未超过五公顷,而且可能从来没有超过几百个人实际居住在这个地方。然而,在这五公顷的范围内,考古学家们发现了一连串显著的政治发展证据。77
The story of Arslantepe begins around 3300 BC, when a temple was built on the site. This temple resembled those of Uruk and her colonies, with storage areas for food and carefully arranged archives of administrative seals, just as in any temple of the Mesopotamian floodplain. But within a few generations the temple was dismantled, and in its place was built a massive private structure enclosing a grand audience chamber and living quarters, as well as storage areas, including an armoury. An assemblage of swords and spearheads – finely crafted of arsenic-rich copper and quite unlike anything found in public buildings of the lowlands at this time – signals not only control over, but a celebration of the means to enact violence: a new aesthetics of personal combat and killing. The excavators have labelled this building the world’s ‘earliest known palace’.
阿尔斯兰特普的故事始于公元前 3300 年左右,当时在这个地方建了一座神庙。这座神庙与乌鲁克及其殖民地的神庙相似,有储存食物的区域和精心安排的行政印章档案,就像美索不达米亚洪泛区的任何神庙一样。但在几代人的时间里,神庙就被拆除了,取而代之的是一个巨大的私人建筑,其中包括一个大的观众厅和生活区,以及包括军械库在内的储存区。一系列的剑和矛头 —— 用富含砷的铜精心制作,与此时低地的公共建筑中发现的任何东西都不一样 —— 不仅预示着对暴力的控制,而且是对暴力手段的庆祝:一种新的个人战斗和杀戮美学。发掘者将这座建筑称为世界上 “已知最早的宫殿”。
From 3100 BC, across the hilly country of what’s now eastern Turkey, and then in other places on the edge of urban civilization, we see evidence for the rise of a warrior aristocracy, heavily armed with metal spears and swords, living in what appear to be hill forts or small palaces. All traces of bureaucracy disappear. In their place we find not just aristocratic households – reminiscent of Beowulf’s mead hall, or indeed the Pacific Northwest Coast in the nineteenth century – but for the first time also tombs of men who, in life, were clearly considered heroic individuals of some sort, accompanied to the afterlife by prodigious quantities of metal weaponry, treasures, elaborate textiles and drinking gear.78
从公元前 3100 年开始,在现在的土耳其东部的丘陵地带,然后在城市文明边缘的其他地方,我们看到,证明了一个战士贵族的崛起,他们全副武装着金属长矛和剑,住在似乎是山地堡垒或小宫殿中。所有官僚机构的痕迹都消失了。取而代之的是,我们不仅发现了贵族家庭 —— 让人联想到贝奥武夫的蜂蜜酒馆,或者确实是十九世纪的太平洋西北海岸 —— 而且还首次发现了那些生前显然被认为是某种英雄的人的坟墓,伴随着大量的金属武器、珍宝、精致的纺织品和酒具走向来世。78
Everything about these tombs and their makers, living on the frontiers of urban life, bespeaks a spirit of extravagance. Copious amounts of fine food, drink and personal jewellery were deposited. There are signs that such funerals could spiral into spectacles of competitive one-upmanship, as what must have been priceless trophies, heirlooms and prizes of unparalleled magnificence were offered up or even intentionally destroyed; some, too, are accompanied by subsidiary burials of those apparently slaughtered at the graveside as offerings.79 Unlike the isolated ‘princes’ and ‘princesses’ of the Ice Age, there are whole cemeteries full of such burials – for example at Başur Höyük, on the way to Lake Van, while at Arslantepe we see exactly the kind of physical infrastructure (forts, storehouses) we might expect from a society dominated by some sort of warrior aristocracy.
这些墓葬和它们的制造者,生活在城市生活的边缘,一切都显示出一种奢侈的精神。墓中存放了大量的精美食物、饮料和个人珠宝。有迹象表明,这种葬礼可能会演变成竞争性的一决胜负的场面,因为那些肯定是无价的战利品、传家宝和无与伦比的奖品被献上,甚至被故意毁掉;有些葬礼还伴随着那些显然是在墓边被宰杀作为祭品的副葬品。79与冰河时代孤立的 “王子” 和 “公主” 不同,整个墓地都是这样的墓葬 —— 例如在 Basur Höyük,在通往 Van 湖的路上,而在 Arslantepe,我们看到的正是我们可能期待的由某种战士贵族主导的社会的物质基础设施(堡垒、仓库)。
Here we have the very beginnings of an aristocratic ethos with a long afterlife and some wide ramifications in the history of Eurasia (something we touched on earlier, when alluding to Herodotus’ account of the Scythians, and Ibn Fadlan’s later observations on the ‘barbarian’ Germanic tribes of the Volga). We are witnessing the first known emergence of what Hector Munro Chadwick famously called ‘heroic societies’ and, moreover, these societies all seem to have emerged just where his analysis tells us to expect them: on the margins of bureaucratically ordered cities.
在这里,我们看到了一种贵族精神的雏形,这种精神具有长久的生命力,并在欧亚大陆的历史上产生了一些广泛的影响(这一点我们在前面提到希罗多德对斯基泰人的描述,以及伊本·法德兰后来对伏尔加河的 “野蛮人” 日耳曼部落的观察时已经提到过)。我们正在见证赫克托·蒙罗·查德威克著名的 “英雄社会” 的首次出现,而且,这些社会似乎都出现在他的分析告诉我们应该期待的地方:在官僚秩序的城市的边缘地带。
Writing in the 1920s, Chadwick – Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, at much the same time J. R. R. Tolkien held that post at Oxford – was initially concerned with why great traditions of epic poetry (Nordic sagas, the works of Homer, the Ramayana) always seemed to emerge among people in contact with and often employed by the urban civilizations of their day, but who ultimately rejected the values of those same civilizations. For a long time, his notion of ‘heroic societies’ fell into a certain disfavour: there was a widespread assumption that such societies did not really exist but were, like the society represented in Homer’s Iliad, retroactively reconstructed in epic literature.
查德威克 —— 剑桥大学盎格鲁·撒克逊语教授,与 J·R.R·托尔金在牛津大学担任该职务的时间差不多 —— 在 20 世纪 20 年代写作时,最初关注的是为什么伟大的史诗传统(北欧传奇、荷马作品、罗摩衍那)似乎总是出现在与当时的城市文明接触并经常受雇于这些文明的人们中间,但他们最终拒绝这些文明的。在很长一段时间里,他的 “英雄社会” 的概念陷入了某种不受欢迎的境地:人们普遍认为这种社会并不真正存在,而是像荷马的《伊利亚特》中所代表的社会一样,在史诗文学中被追溯性地重构。
But as archaeologists have more recently discovered, there is a very real pattern of heroic burials, indicating in turn an emerging cultural emphasis on feasting, drinking, the beauty and fame of the individual male warrior.80 And it appears time and again around the fringes of urban life, often in strikingly similar forms, over the course of the Eurasian Bronze Age. In searching for the common features of such ‘heroic societies’, we can find a fairly consistent list in precisely the traditions of epic poetry that Chadwick compared (in each region, the first written versions being much later in date than the heroic burials themselves, but shedding light on earlier customs). It’s a list which applies just as well, in most of its features, to the potlatch societies of the Northwest Coast or, for that matter, the Māori of New Zealand.
但是,正如考古学家最近发现的那样,存在着一种非常真实的英雄墓葬模式,这反过来又表明了一种新兴的文化对宴饮、饮酒、男性战士个人的美貌和名声的重视。80在欧亚青铜时代的过程中,它一次又一次地出现在城市生活的边缘,往往以惊人的相似形式出现。在寻找这种 “英雄社会” 的共同特征时,我们可以在查德威克所比较的史诗传统中找到一个相当一致的清单(在每个地区,最早的书面版本在时间上比英雄墓葬本身要晚得多,但却揭示了早期的习俗)。这张清单的大部分特征同样适用于西北海岸的锅庄社会,或者,就这一点而言,新西兰的毛利人。
All these cultures were aristocracies, without any centralized authority or principle of sovereignty (or, maybe, some largely symbolic, formal one). Instead of a single centre, we find numerous heroic figures competing fiercely with one another for retainers and slaves. ‘Politics’, in such societies, was composed of a history of personal debts of loyalty or vengeance between heroic individuals; all, moreover, focus on game-like contests as the primary business of ritual, indeed political, life.81 Often, massive amounts of loot or wealth were squandered, sacrificed or given away in such theatrical performances. Moreover, all such groups explicitly resisted certain features of nearby urban civilizations: above all, writing, for which they tended to substitute poets or priests who engaged in rote memorization or elaborate techniques of oral composition. Inside their own societies, at least, they also rejected commerce. Hence standardized currency, either in physical or credit forms, tended to be eschewed, with the focus instead on unique material treasures.
所有这些文化都是贵族制,没有任何中央集权或主权原则(或者,也许是一些基本象征性的正式原则)。我们发现众多的英雄人物并没有一个单一的中心,而是为了争夺家臣和奴隶而相互激烈竞争。在这样的社会中,“政治” 是由英雄人物之间的个人忠诚或复仇债务的历史组成的;此外,所有的人都把游戏般的竞争作为仪式,实际上是政治生活的主要事务。81通常,大量的战利品或财富在这种戏剧性的表演中被挥霍、牺牲或赠送。此外,所有这些群体都明确抵制附近城市文明的某些特征:首先是写作,他们倾向于用诗人或祭司来代替写作,从事死记硬背或精心设计的口头写作技术。至少在他们自己的社会里,他们也拒绝商业。因此,标准化的货币,无论是实物还是信用形式,都倾向于被摒弃,而专注于独特的物质财富。
It goes without saying that we cannot possibly hope to trace all these various tendencies back into periods for which no written testimony exists. But it is equally clear that, insofar as modern archaeology allows us to identify an ultimate origin for ‘heroic societies’ of this sort, it is to be found precisely on the spatial and cultural margins of the world’s first great urban expansion (indeed, some of the earliest aristocratic tombs in the Turkish highlands were dug directly into the ruins of abandoned Uruk colonies).82 Aristocracies, perhaps monarchy itself, first emerged in opposition to the egalitarian cities of the Mesopotamian plains, for which they likely had much the same mixed but ultimately hostile and murderous feelings as Alaric the Goth would later have towards Rome and everything it stood for, Genghis Khan towards Samarkand or Merv, or Timur towards Delhi.
不言而喻,我们不可能希望将所有这些不同的趋势追溯到没有书面证据存在的时期。但同样清楚的是,只要现代考古学允许我们确定这种 “英雄社会” 的最终起源,它恰恰是在世界第一次城市大扩张的空间和文化边缘找到的(事实上,土耳其高原的一些最早的贵族墓葬是直接挖在废弃的乌鲁克殖民地的废墟上)。82贵族制度,也许是君主制本身,首先是在反对美索不达米亚平原的平等主义城市中出现的,他们对这些城市的感情很可能与哥特人阿拉里克后来对罗马和它所代表的一切,成吉思汗对撒马尔罕或梅尔夫,或帖木儿对德里的感情一样,错综复杂,但最终是敌对和谋杀的。
Fast-forward now 1,000 years from the Uruk expansion to around 2600 BC . On the banks of the Indus River, in what is today the Pakistani province of Sindh, a city was founded on virgin soil: Mohenjo-daro. It remained there for 700 years.83 The city is considered the greatest expression of a new form of society that flourished in the valley of the Indus at the time; a form of society which archaeologists have come to know simply as the ‘Indus’ or ‘Harappan’ civilization. It was South Asia’s first urban culture. Here we will find further evidence that Bronze Age cities – the world’s first large-scale, planned human settlements – could emerge in the absence of ruling classes and managerial elites; but those of the Indus valley also present some uniquely puzzling features, which archaeologists have debated for more than a century.84 Let’s introduce both the problem and its key locus – the site of Mohenjo-daro – in a little more detail.
从乌鲁克的扩张到公元前 2600 年左右,现在快进了 1000 年。在印度河畔,在今天的巴基斯坦信德省,一座城市在处女地上建立起来。摩亨佐·达罗。它在那里停留了 700 年。83这座城市被认为是当时在印度河流域蓬勃发展的一种新的社会形式的最大体现;这种社会形式被考古学家简单地称为 “印度河” 或 “哈拉邦” 文明。它是南亚的第一个城市文化。在这里,我们将找到进一步的证据,证明青铜时代的城市 —— 世界上第一个大规模的、有计划的人类定居点 —— 可以在没有统治阶级和管理精英的情况下出现;但印度河流域的城市也呈现出一些独特的令人困惑的特征,考古学家对此已经争论了一个多世纪。84让我们更详细地介绍一下这个问题和它的关键地点 —— 摩亨佐·达罗遗址。
On first inspection, Mohenjo-daro bears out its reputation as the most completely preserved city of the Bronze Age world. There’s something staggering about it all: a brazen modernity, which was not lost on the first excavators of the site, who didn’t hesitate to designate certain areas ‘high streets’, ‘police barracks’ and so on (though much of this initial interpretation, as it turned out, was fantasy). Most of the city consists of the brick-built houses of the Lower Town, with its grid-like arrangement of streets, long boulevards and sophisticated drainage and sanitation systems (terracotta sewage pipes, private and public toilets and bathrooms were ubiquitous). Above these surprisingly comfortable arrangements loomed the Upper Citadel, a raised civic centre, also known (for reasons we’ll explain) as the Mound of the Great Bath. Though both parts of the city stood on massive artificial foundations of heaped earth, lifting them above the floodplain, the Upper Citadel was also encased in a wall of baked bricks made to standard dimensions which extended all the way round it, affording further protection when the Indus broke its banks.85
乍一看,摩亨佐·达罗证明了其作为青铜时代世界上保存最完整的城市的声誉。这一切都令人震惊:一种厚颜无耻的现代性,这一点在该遗址的第一批发掘者身上并没有消失,他们毫不犹豫地将某些区域命名为 “高街”、“警察营房” 等等(尽管这种最初的解释,后来证明,大部分是幻想的)。城市的大部分由下城的砖砌房屋组成,街道呈网格状排列,林荫道很长,有复杂的排水和卫生系统(陶制污水管、私人和公共厕所和浴室无处不在)。在这些令人惊讶的舒适安排之上,隐约可见上城楼,一个高高在上的市政中心,也被称为大浴场之丘(原因我们会解释)。虽然城市的两个部分都站在巨大的人工堆土基础上,将它们提升到洪泛区之上,但上城楼也被包裹在一堵按标准尺寸制作的烤砖墙中,在印度河决堤时提供了进一步的保护。85
In the wider ambit of Indus civilization, there is only one rival to Mohenjo-daro: the site of Harappa (whence the alternative term ‘Harappan civilization’). Of similar magnitude, it lies about 370 miles upstream on the Ravi River, a tributary of the Indus. Many other sites of the same date and cultural family exist, ranging from large towns to hamlets. They extend over most of the area of modern-day Pakistan, and well beyond the floodplain of the Indus, into northern India. For instance, perched on an island amid the salt flats of the Great Rann of Kutch lie the striking remains of Dholavira, a town equipped with over fifteen brick-built reservoirs to capture rainwater and run-off from local streams. The Indus civilization had colonial outposts as far as the Oxus River in northern Afghanistan, where the site of Shortugai presents a miniature replica of its urban mother-culture: ideally placed to tap the rich mineral sources of the Central Asian highlands (lapis, tin and other gemstones and metals). Such materials were prized by lowland artisans and their commercial partners as far away as Iran, Arabia and Mesopotamia. At Lothal, on Gujarat’s Gulf of Khambhat, lie remains of a well-appointed port town facing the Arabian Sea, presumably built by Indus engineers to service maritime trade.86
在更广泛的印度河文明范围内,只有一个与摩亨佐·达罗相匹敌的地方:哈拉帕遗址(因此有了 “哈拉帕文明” 的说法)。它的规模相似,位于印度河支流拉维河的上游约 370 英里处。还有许多其他相同年代和文化家族的遗址存在,从大城镇到小村庄。它们延伸到现代巴基斯坦的大部分地区,并远远超出印度河的洪泛区,进入印度北部。例如,在卡奇大峡谷(Great Rann of Kutch)盐碱地中的一个小岛上,坐落着引人注目的多拉维拉(Dholavira)遗迹,这个城镇配备了超过 15 个砖砌的水库,以收集雨水和当地溪流的径流。印度河文明的殖民前哨远至阿富汗北部的奥克苏斯河,那里的 Shortugai 遗址是其城市母体文化的一个缩影:理想地利用中亚高原丰富的矿物资源(青金石、锡和其他宝石和金属)。这些材料被远在伊朗、阿拉伯和美索不达米亚的低地工匠和他们的商业伙伴所珍视。在古吉拉特邦康巴特湾的洛塔尔,有一个面向阿拉伯海的设施完备的港口城市的遗迹,据推测是印度河流域的工程师为服务海上贸易而建造。86
The Indus civilization had its own script, which appeared and vanished together with its cities. It has not been deciphered. What survives to us are mainly short captions, stamped or incised on storage jars, copper tools and the remnants of a lonely piece of street signage from Dholavira. Short inscriptions also feature on tiny stone amulets, captioning pictorial vignettes or miniature animal figures, carved with striking precision. Most of these are realistic depictions of water buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros, tiger and other local fauna, but they also include fantastic beasts, most often unicorns. Debate surrounds the amulets’ function: were they worn as personal identifiers, for passage through the city’s gated quarters and walled compounds, or perhaps to gain entry to ceremonial occasions? Or were they used for administration, to impress identifying signs on commodities passing among unknown parties: a Bronze Age origin of product-branding? Could they be all of these things?87
印度河文明有自己的文字,它与城市一起出现和消失。它还没有被破译出来。我们现存的主要是一些简短的标题,它们被印在或刻在储物罐、铜制工具和多拉维拉(Dholavira)的一块孤独的街道标牌的残余物上。小小的石制护身符上也有简短的铭文,说明了图画小品或微型动物形象,雕刻得非常精确。其中大部分是对水牛、大象、犀牛、老虎和其他当地动物的写实描绘,但也包括神奇的野兽,最常见的是独角兽。围绕着护身符的功能展开了争论:它们是作为个人的识别标志,用于通过城市的门区和有围墙的院落,或者可能用于进入仪式场合?或者,它们被用于管理,在未知的各方之间传递的商品上留下识别标志:青铜时代的产品品牌起源?它们可能是所有这些东西吗?87
Aside from our inability to make sense of the Indus script, there are many puzzling aspects of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Both were excavated in the early twentieth century, when archaeology was a large-scale and broad-brush affair, with sometimes thousands of workers digging simultaneously. Rapid work on this scale produced striking spatial exposures of street plans, residential neighbourhoods and entire ceremonial precincts. But it largely neglected to chart the site’s development over time, a process that can only be disentangled with more careful methods. For instance, early excavators recorded just the baked-brick foundations of buildings. The superstructures were of softer mud-brick, often missed or unwittingly destroyed in the course of rapid digging; while the upper storeys of large civic structures were originally of fine timber, rotted or removed for reuse in antiquity. What seems in plan to be a single phase of urban construction is, in reality, a false composite made up of different elements from various periods of the city’s history – a city inhabited for over 500 years.88
除了我们无法理解印度河的文字之外,哈拉帕和摩亨佐·达罗还有许多令人困惑的地方。这两个地方都是在二十世纪初发掘的,当时的考古学是一个大规模的、粗略的事情,有时有成千上万的工人同时挖掘。这种规模的快速工作产生了惊人的空间暴露,包括街道规划、住宅区和整个礼仪区。但它在很大程度上忽略了对遗址的长期发展的描述,而这一过程只有用更仔细的方法才能分辨出来。例如,早期的挖掘者只记录了建筑物的烤砖地基。上层建筑是较软的泥砖,在快速挖掘的过程中经常被遗漏或不知不觉地被破坏;而大型市政建筑的上层原来是精美的木材,在古代已经腐烂或被拆除重新使用。在计划中似乎是单一阶段的城市建设,实际上是由城市历史上不同时期的不同元素组成的虚假复合体 —— 这座城市已经居住了 500 多年。88
All of which leaves us with plenty of known unknowns, including the city’s size or population (recent estimates suggest up to 40,000 residents, but really we can only guess).89 It’s not even clear where to draw the city boundaries. Some scholars include only the immediately visible areas of the planned Lower Town and the Upper Citadel as part of the city proper, yielding a total area of 100 hectares. Others note scattered evidence for the city’s extension over a far greater area, maybe three times this size – we’d have to call them ‘Lower, Lower Towns’ – long since submerged by floodplain soils: a poignant illustration of that conspiracy between nature and culture which so often makes us forget that shanty dwellers even exist.
所有这些都给我们留下了大量已知的未知数,包括城市的规模或人口(最近的估计表明最多有 4 万居民,但实际上我们只能猜测)。89甚至连在哪里划定城市边界也不清楚。一些学者只把计划中的下城和上城的直接可见区域作为城市的一部分,得出的总面积为 100 公顷。其他人则注意到,有零星的证据表明,城市的扩展范围要大得多,可能是这个面积的三倍 —— 我们不得不称它们为 “下城,下城” —— 早已被洪泛区的土壤所淹没:这是自然与文化之间的阴谋的一个凄美说明,它常常使我们忘记棚户区居民甚至存在。
But it’s this last point that leads us in more promising directions. Despite all its problems, Mohenjo-daro and its sister sites in the Punjab do offer some insights into the nature of civic life in the first cities of South Asia, and into the wider question that we posed at the start of this chapter: is there a causal relationship between scale and inequality in human societies?
但正是这最后一点将我们引向了更有希望的方向。尽管存在种种问题,摩亨佐·达罗及其位于 Punjab 的姐妹遗址确实为南亚第一批城市的公民生活性质提供了一些启示,也为我们在本章开头提出的更广泛的问题提供了启示:人类社会的规模和不平等之间是否存在因果关系?
Let’s consider, for a moment, what archaeology tells us about wealth distribution at Mohenjo-daro. Contrary to what we might expect, there is no concentration of material wealth on the Upper Citadel. Quite the opposite, in fact. Metals, gemstones and worked shell – for example – were widely available to households of the Lower Town; archaeologists have recovered such goods from caches beneath house floors, and bundles of them are scattered over every quarter of the site.90 The same goes for little terracotta figures of people wearing bangles, diadems and other flashy personal adornment. Not so the Upper Citadel.
让我们考虑一下,考古学告诉我们摩亨佐·达罗的财富分布情况。与我们所期望的相反,物质财富并没有集中在上城楼。事实上,恰恰相反。金属、宝石和加工过的贝壳 —— 例如 —— 在下城的家庭中广泛存在;考古学家从房屋地板下的藏匿处找到了这些物品,成捆的物品散落在遗址的每一个角落。90同样的,还有戴着手镯、护身符和其他华丽的个人装饰品的小陶器人。上城堡则不然。
Writing, and also standard weights and measures, were also widely distributed across the Lower Town; so too evidence for craft occupations and industries from metalworking and potting to the manufacture of beads. All flourished down there, in the Lower Town, but are absent from the city’s Upper Citadel, where the main civic structures stood.91 Objects made for personal display had little place, it seems, in the most elevated quarters of the city. Instead, what defines the Upper Citadel are buildings like the Great Bath – a large sunken pool measuring roughly forty feet long and over six feet deep, lined with carefully executed brickwork, sealed with plaster and bitumen and entered on either side via steps with timber treads – all constructed to the finest architectural standards, yet unmarked by monuments dedicated to particular rulers, or indeed any other signs of personal aggrandizement.
书写,以及标准的度量衡,也广泛分布在下城;手工艺职业和工业的证据也是如此,从金属加工、制陶到珠子制造。所有这些都在下城蓬勃发展,但在城市的上城,即主要的市政建筑所在地,却没有这些东西。91为个人展示而制作的物品似乎在城市的最高层没有什么地位。相反,定义上城的是像大浴场这样的建筑 —— 一个大约 40 英尺长、6 英尺多深的大型下沉式水池,内衬是精心制作的砖块,用石膏和沥青密封,通过两边的木质踏板的台阶进入 —— 所有这些都是按照最好的建筑标准建造的,但没有专门为特定统治者建造的纪念碑,或者其他任何个人膨胀的迹象。
Because of its lack of royal sculpture, or indeed other forms of monumental depiction, the Indus valley has been termed a ‘faceless civilization’.92 At Mohenjo-daro, it seems, the focus of civic life was not a palace or cenotaph, but a public facility for purifying the body. Brick-made bathing floors and platforms also were a standard fixture in most dwellings of the Lower Town. Citizens seem to have been familiar with very specific notions of cleanliness, with daily ablutions apparently forming part of their domestic routine. The Great Bath was, at one level, an outsized version of these residential washing facilities. On another level, though, life on the Upper Citadel seems to negate that of the Lower Town.
由于缺乏皇家雕塑或其他形式的纪念性描述,印度河流域被称为 “无脸文明”。92在摩亨佐·达罗,公民生活的重点似乎不是宫殿或纪念碑,而是用于净化身体的公共设施。砖砌的浴室地板和平台也是下城大多数住宅的标准设施。市民们似乎已经熟悉了非常具体的清洁概念,每天的洗浴显然是他们家庭生活的一部分。在某种程度上,大浴场是这些住宅洗涤设施的一个大版本。但在另一个层面上,上城的生活似乎与下城的生活相抵触。
So long as the Great Bath was in use – and it was for some centuries – we find no evidence of industrial activities nearby. The narrowing lanes on the acropolis effectively prevented the use of ox-drawn carts and similar commercial traffic. Here, it was the Bath itself – and the act of bathing – that became the focus of social life and labour. Barracks and storerooms adjacent to the Bath housed a staff (whether in attached or rotating service, we cannot know) and their essential supplies. The Upper Citadel was a special sort of ‘city within the city’, in which ordinary principles of household organization went into reverse.93
只要大浴场还在使用 —— 而且是在几个世纪里 —— 我们就没有发现附近有工业活动的证据。卫城上狭窄的小路有效地阻止了牛车和类似商业交通的使用。在这里,浴场本身 —— 以及洗澡的行为 —— 成为社会生活和劳动的焦点。与浴场相邻的兵营和贮藏室容纳了工作人员(无论他们是隶属还是轮流服务,我们都无法得知)和他们的基本用品。上城是一种特殊的 “城中之城”,在这里,普通的家庭组织原则被颠覆了。93
All this is redolent of the inequality of the caste system, with its hierarchical division of social functions, organized on an ascending scale of purity.94 But the earliest recorded reference to caste in South Asia comes only 1,000 years later, in the Rig Veda – an anthology of sacrificial hymns, probably composed around 1200 BC . The system, as described in later Sanskrit epics, consisted of four hereditary ranks or varnas: priests (brahmins), warriors or nobles (kshatriyas), farmers and traders (vaishyas) and labourers (shudras) ; and also those so lowly as to be excluded from the varnas entirely. The very top ranks belong to world-renouncers, whose abstention from trappings of personal status raises them to a higher spiritual plane. Commerce, industry and status rivalries may all thrive, but the wealth, power or prosperity being fought over is always seen as of lesser value – in the great scheme of things – than the purity of priestly caste.
所有这一切都体现了种姓制度的不平等,其社会职能的等级划分按纯度的高低组织。94但南亚最早的关于种姓的记载是在 1000 年之后,在《梨俱吠陀》中,这是一本祭祀颂歌选集,可能是在公元前 1200 年左右创作的。后来的梵文史诗中描述的制度包括四个世袭等级或varnas:祭司(婆罗门)、武士或贵族(刹帝利)、农民和商人(吠舍)以及工人(首陀罗);还有那些卑微到被完全排除在varnas之外的人。最顶层的人属于世俗的人,他们对个人地位的节制使他们上升到更高的精神层面。商业、工业和地位之争可能都会蓬勃发展,但被争夺的财富、权力或繁荣总是被视为价值较低 —— 在事物的大计划中 —— 而不是祭司种姓的纯洁。
The varna system is about as ‘unequal’ as any social system can possibly be, yet where one ranks within it has less to do with how many material goods one can pile up or lay claim to than with one’s relation to certain (polluting) substances – physical dirt and waste, but also bodily matter linked to birth, death and menstruation – and the people who handle them. All this creates serious problems for any contemporary scholar seeking to apply Gini coefficients or any other property-based measure of ‘inequality’ to the society in question. On the other hand, and despite the great gaps in time between our sources, it might allow us to make sense of some of Mohenjo-daro’s otherwise puzzling features, such as the fact that those residential buildings most closely resembling palaces are not located on the Upper Citadel but crammed into the streets of the Lower Town – that bit closer to the mud, sewage pipes and paddy fields, where such jostling for worldly status seems to have properly belonged.95
瓦尔纳制度是任何社会制度都可能存在的 “不平等”,但一个人在其中的地位与其说是与一个人可以堆积或要求多少物质有关,不如说是与某些(污染)物质的关系有关 —— 物理上的污垢和废物,以及与出生、死亡和月经有关的身体物质,还有处理这些物质的人。所有这些都给任何试图将基尼系数或任何其他基于财产的 “不平等” 措施应用于有关社会的当代学者带来了严重问题。另一方面,尽管我们的资料来源之间存在着巨大的时间差距,但它可以让我们理解摩亨佐·达罗的一些令人费解的特征,比如那些最像宫殿的住宅建筑,但却不在上城,而是挤在下城的街道上 —— 离泥土、污水管和稻田更近一些,这种争夺世俗地位的行为似乎应该属于那里。95
Clearly, we can’t just project the social world evoked in Sanskrit literature indiscriminately on to the much earlier Indus civilization. If the first South Asian cities were indeed organized on caste-like principles, then we would immediately have to acknowledge a major difference from the system of ranks described over a millennium later in Sanskrit texts, where second-highest status (just below brahmins) is reserved for the warrior caste known as kshatriyas . In the Bronze Age Indus valley there is no evidence of anything like a kshatriya class of warrior-nobles, nor of the kind of aggrandizing behaviour associated with such groups in later epic tales such as the Mahabharata or Ramayana . Even the largest cities, like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, yield no evidence of spectacular sacrifices or feasts, no pictorial narratives of military prowess or celebrations of famous deeds, no sign of tournaments in which anyone vied over titles and treasures, no aristocratic burials. And if such things were going on in the Indus cities at the time, there would be ways to know.
显然,我们不能把梵文文献中唤起的社会世界不加区分地投射到更早的印度河文明上。如果第一批南亚城市确实是按照类似种姓的原则组织起来的,那么我们就必须立即承认与一千年后梵文文献中描述的等级制度有很大的不同,在梵文文献中,第二高的地位(仅次于婆罗门)是保留给被称为刹帝利的战士种姓的。在青铜时代的印度河流域,没有任何证据表明有类似刹帝利的武士贵族阶层,也没有证据表明在后来的史诗故事(如《摩诃婆罗多》或《罗摩衍那》)中与此类群体有关的那种膨胀行为。即使是最大的城市,如哈拉帕和摩亨佐·达罗,也没有发现壮观的祭祀或宴会的证据,没有关于军事力量或庆祝著名事迹的图画叙述,没有任何人争夺头衔和财物的锦标赛的迹象,没有贵族的葬礼。如果当时印度河流域的城市有这样的事情发生,那么就有办法知道。
Indus civilization wasn’t some kind of commercial or spiritual arcadia; nor was it an entirely peaceful society.96 But neither does it contain any evidence for charismatic authority figures: war leaders, lawgivers and the like. A small, cloaked sculpture made of yellow limestone from Mohenjo-daro, known in the literature as the ‘priest-king’, is often presented as such. But, in fact, there’s no particular reason to believe the figure really is a priest-king or an authority figure of any sort. It’s simply a limestone image of an urbane Bronze Age man with a beard. The fact that past generations of scholars have insisted on referring to him as ‘priest-king’ is testimony more to their own assumptions about what they think must have been happening in early Asian cities than anything the evidence implies.
印度河文明并不是某种商业或精神上的阿卡迪亚;也不是一个完全和平的社会。96但它也没有包含任何关于魅力型权威人物的证据:战争领袖、执法者等等。摩亨佐·达罗的一个用黄色石灰石制成的小型斗篷雕塑,在文献中被称为 “牧师王”,经常被描述成这样。但是,事实上,没有特别的理由相信这个人物真的是一个祭司国王或任何类型的权威人物。它仅仅是一个青铜时代有胡子的人的石灰岩图像。过去几代学者坚持把他称为 “祭司王”,这更多地是证明了他们自己对亚洲早期城市所发生的事情的假设,而不是证据所暗示的事情。
Over time, experts have largely come to agree that there’s no evidence for priest-kings, warrior nobility, or anything like what we would recognize as a ‘state’ in the urban civilization of the Indus valley. Can we speak, then, of ‘egalitarian cities’ here as well, and if so, in what sense? If the Upper Citadel at Mohenjo-daro really was dominated by some sort of ascetic order, literally ‘higher’ than everyone else, and the area around the citadel by wealthy merchants, then there was a clear hierarchy between groups. Yet this doesn’t necessarily mean that the groups themselves were hierarchical in their internal organization, or that ascetics and merchants had a greater say than anyone else when it came to matters of day-to-day governance.
随着时间的推移,专家们在很大程度上同意,在印度河流域的城市文明中,没有证据表明有祭司国王、战士贵族或任何类似于我们承认的 “国家” 的东西。那么,我们是否也可以在这里谈论 “平等主义的城市”,如果可以,在什么意义上?如果摩亨佐·达罗的上城真的是由某种苦行僧团主导的,从字面上看比其他人 “高等”,而城堡周围的地区则是由富有的商人主导的,那么群体之间就有明显的等级制度。然而,这并不一定意味着这些团体本身在其内部组织中是有等级的,或者说苦行僧和商人在处理日常管理事务时比其他人更有发言权。
Now, you might at this point be objecting: ‘well, yes, technically that may be true, but honestly, what’s the chance that they weren’t hierarchical, or that the pure or the wealthy did not have greater say in running the city’s affairs?’ In fact, it seems very difficult for most of us even to imagine how self-conscious egalitarianism on a large scale would work. But this again simply serves to demonstrate how automatically we have come to accept an evolutionary narrative in which authoritarian rule is somehow the natural outcome whenever a large enough group of people are brought together (and, by implication, that something called ‘democracy’ emerges only much later, as a conceptual breakthrough – and most likely just once, in ancient Greece).
现在,你在这一点上可能会反对:'好吧,是的,技术上这可能是真的,但说实话,他们没有等级制度,或者纯洁的人或富人在管理城市事务方面没有更大的发言权,这有什么可能?事实上,我们大多数人甚至似乎很难想象自觉的平等主义在大规模的情况下会如何运作。但这也只是表明我们是多么自动地接受了一种进化论的叙述,在这种叙述中,只要有足够多的人聚集在一起,专制统治就是某种程度上的自然结果(而且,通过暗示,称为 “民主” 的东西只是在很久以后才出现,作为一种概念上的突破 —— 而且很可能只是一次,在古希腊)。
Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority. These latter are usually treated as a default mode of history: the kind of social structures you would simply expect to see in the absence of evidence for anything else.97 We could speculate about where this habit of thought comes from, but it wouldn’t help us to decide if the everyday governance of early Indus cities could have proceeded on egalitarian lines, alongside the existence of ascetic social orders. It is more useful, we suggest, to level the interpretive playing field by asking if there are cases of such things happening in later, better-documented periods of South Asian history.
学者们倾向于要求为在遥远的过去存在任何形式的民主机构提供明确和无可辩驳的证据。令人惊讶的是,他们从来没有要求对自上而下的权力结构提供类似的严格证据。后者通常被视为一种默认的历史模式:在没有其他证据的情况下,你会简单地期望看到那种社会结构。97我们可以推测这种思维习惯的来源,但这并不能帮助我们决定早期印度河流域城市的日常管理是否可以在平等主义的基础上进行,同时存在禁欲主义的社会秩序。我们建议,通过询问在南亚历史上较晚的、有较多文献记载的时期是否有这种情况发生,来平整解释的场地,这样做更有用。
In fact, such cases are not difficult to find. Consider the social milieu from which Buddhist monasteries, or sangha, arose. The word sangha was actually first used for the popular assemblies that governed many South Asian cities in the Buddha’s lifetime – roughly the fifth century BC – and early Buddhist texts insist that the Buddha was himself inspired by the example of these republics, and in particular the importance they accorded to convening full and frequent public assemblies. Early Buddhist sanghas were meticulous in their demands for all monks to gather together in order to reach unanimous decisions on matters of general concern, resorting to majority vote only when consensus broke down.98 All this remains true of sangha to this day. Over the course of time, Buddhist monasteries have varied a great deal in governance – many have been extremely hierarchical in practice. But the important thing here is that even 2,000 years ago it was not considered in any way unusual for members of ascetic orders to make decisions in much the same way as, for example, contemporary anti-authoritarian activists do in Europe or Latin America (by consensus process, with a fallback on majority vote); that these forms of governance were based on an ideal of equality; and that there were entire cities governed in what was seen to be exactly the same way.99
事实上,这样的案例并不难找。考虑一下佛教寺院,即sangha,产生的社会环境。僧伽这个词实际上是在佛陀在世时 —— 大约在公元前五世纪 —— 首次用于管理许多南亚城市的民众集会,早期的佛教文献坚持认为,佛陀本人是受到这些共和国的启发,尤其是,他们重视召开充分和经常的公共集会。早期的佛教僧团要求所有僧侣聚集在一起,就普遍关心的问题达成一致的决定,只有在共识破裂时才诉诸于多数票。98这一切至今仍是僧伽的真实写照。随着时间的推移,佛教寺院在管理上有很大的不同 —— 许多寺院在实践中都有极强的等级制度。但重要的是,即使在两千年前,苦行僧团的成员以与欧洲或拉丁美洲的当代反独裁者相同的方式(通过协商一致的程序,以多数票为后盾)做出决定,也丝毫不觉得不寻常;这些治理形式是基于平等的理想;而且整个城市的治理方式也被认为是完全一样的。99
We might go further still and ask: are there any known examples of societies with formal caste hierarchies, in which practical governance nonetheless takes place on egalitarian lines? It may seem paradoxical but the answer, again, is yes: there is plenty of evidence for such arrangements, some of which continue to this day. Perhaps best documented is the seka system on the island of Bali, whose population adopted Hinduism in the Middle Ages. Balinese are not only divided by caste: their society is conceived as a total hierarchy in which not just every group but every individual knows (or at least, should know) their exact position in relation to everyone else. In principle, then, there are no equals, and most Balinese would argue that in the greater cosmic scheme of things, this must always be so.
我们可以进一步问:是否有任何已知的具有正式种姓等级制度的社会的例子,在这些社会中,实际的治理还是按照平等主义的路线进行的?这可能看起来很矛盾,但答案是肯定的:有很多证据表明有这样的安排,其中一些安排持续到今天。也许最好的记录是巴厘岛的 seka 系统,该岛居民在中世纪接受了印度教。巴厘岛人不仅按种姓划分:他们的社会被认为是一个完整的等级制度,其中不仅每个群体,而且每个人都知道(或至少应该知道)他们与其他人的确切位置。原则上,没有平等的人,而且大多数巴厘岛人认为,在更大的宇宙计划中,情况必须永远如此。
At the same time, however, practical affairs such as the management of communities, temples and agricultural life are organized according to the seka system, in which everyone is expected to participate on equal terms and come to decisions by consensus. For instance, if a neighbourhood association meets to discuss repairing the roofs of public buildings, or what to serve for food during an upcoming dance contest, those who consider themselves particularly high and mighty, offended by the prospect of having to sit in a circle on the ground with lowly neighbours, may choose not to attend; but in that case they are obliged to pay fines for non-attendance – fines which are then used to pay for the feast or the repairs.100 We currently have no way of knowing if such a system prevailed in the Indus valley over 4,000 years ago. The example merely serves to underscore that there is no necessary correspondence between overarching concepts of social hierarchy and the practical mechanics of local governance.
然而,与此同时,诸如社区管理、寺庙和农业生活等实际事务是按照 seka 系统组织的,在这个系统中,每个人都应在平等的条件下参与,并通过协商一致作出决定。例如,如果一个邻里协会开会讨论修理公共建筑的屋顶,或在即将举行的舞蹈比赛中提供什么食物,那些认为自己特别高大的人,因不得不与低下的邻居们在地上围成一圈而感到不快,可以选择不参加;但在这种情况下,他们必须为不参加会议支付罚款 —— 然后将罚款用于支付宴会或修理费用。100我们目前无法知道这样的制度是否在 4000 多年前的印度河流域盛行。这个例子只是为了强调,社会等级制度的总体概念和地方治理的实际机制之间没有必然的对应关系。
The same is, incidentally, true of kingdoms and empires. One very common theory held that these tended to first appear in river valleys, because agriculture there involved the maintenance of complex irrigation systems, which in turn required some form of administrative co-ordination and control. Bali again provides the perfect counter-example. For most of its history Bali was divided into a series of kingdoms, endlessly squabbling over this or that. It is also famous as a rather small volcanic island which manages to support one of the densest populations on earth by a complex system of irrigated wet-rice agriculture. Yet the kingdoms seem to have had no role whatsoever in the management of the irrigation system. This was governed by a series of ‘water-temples’, through which the distribution of water was managed by an even more complex system of consensual decision-making, according to egalitarian principles, by the farmers themselves.101
顺带一提,王国和帝国也是如此。一种非常普遍的理论认为,这些国家往往首先出现在河谷地区,因为那里的农业涉及维护复杂的灌溉系统,而这又需要某种形式的行政协调和控制。巴厘岛再次提供了一个完美的反例。在其大部分历史中,巴厘岛被分为一系列的王国,无休止地争夺这个或那个。它也是著名的小火山岛,通过复杂的灌溉湿稻农业系统,设法支持地球上最密集的人口之一。然而,王国似乎在灌溉系统的管理方面没有任何作用。这是由一系列的 “水神庙” 管理的,通过这些水神庙,水的分配是由农民自己根据平等主义原则,通过更复杂的协商一致的决策系统来管理。101
So far in this chapter we’ve looked at what happened when cities first appeared in three distinct parts of Eurasia. In each case, we noted the absence of monarchs or any evidence of a warrior elite, and the corresponding likelihood that each had instead developed institutions of communal self-governance. Within those broad parameters, each regional tradition was very different. Contrasts between the expansion of Uruk and the Ukrainian mega-sites illustrate this point with particular clarity. Both appear to have developed an ethos of explicit egalitarianism – but it took strikingly different forms in each.
到目前为止,在本章中我们已经研究了城市首次出现在欧亚大陆三个不同地区时的情况。在每一种情况下,我们都注意到没有君主或任何战争精英的证据,以及相应的可能性,即每个人都发展了社区自治机构。在这些广泛的参数中,每个地区的传统都非常不同。乌鲁克的扩张和乌克兰的大遗址之间的对比,特别清楚地说明了这一点。两者似乎都发展了一种明确的平等主义精神 —— 但它在每一个地方都采取了惊人的不同形式。
It is possible to express these differences at a purely formal level. A self-conscious ethos of egalitarianism, at any point in history, might take either of two diametrically opposing forms. We can insist that everyone is, or should be, precisely the same (at least in the ways that we consider important); or alternatively, we can insist that everyone is so utterly different from each other that there are simply no criteria for comparison (for example, we are all unique individuals, and so there is no basis upon which any one of us can be considered better than another). Real-life egalitarianism will normally tend to involve a bit of both.
有可能在纯粹的形式层面上表达这些差异。在历史上的任何时候,一种自觉的平等主义精神都可能采取两种截然相反的形式。我们可以坚持认为,每个人都是或应该是完全一样的(至少在我们认为重要的方面);或者,我们可以坚持认为每个人都是完全不同的,根本没有比较的标准(例如,我们都是独特的个体,因此没有任何基础可以认为我们中的任何一个人比另一个人更好)。现实生活中的平等主义通常会涉及到这两点。
Yet it could be argued that Mesopotamia – with its standardized household products, allocation of uniform payments to temple employees, and public assemblies – seems to have largely embraced the first version. Ukrainian mega-sites, in which each household seems to have developed its own unique artistic style and, presumably, idiosyncratic domestic rituals, embraced the second.102 The Indus valley appears – if our interpretation is broadly correct – to represent yet a third possibility, where rigorous equality in certain areas (even the bricks were all precisely the same size) was complemented by explicit hierarchy in others.
然而可以说,美索不达米亚 —— 其标准化的家庭产品、向神庙雇员分配统一的报酬以及公共集会 —— 似乎在很大程度上接受了第一种版本。乌克兰的大型遗址 —— 其中每个家庭似乎都形成了自己独特的艺术风格,而且据推测,还有特异的家庭仪式 —— 接受了第二种说法。102印度河谷似乎 —— 如果我们的解释大致正确的话 —— 代表了第三种可能性,在某些领域的严格平等(甚至砖块都是精确的相同大小)被其他领域的明确等级制度所补充。
It’s important to stress that we are not arguing that the very first cities to appear in any region of the world were invariably founded on egalitarian principles (in fact, we will shortly see a perfect counter-example). What we are saying is that archaeological evidence shows this to have been a surprisingly common pattern, which goes against conventional evolutionary assumptions about the effects of scale on human society. In each of the cases we’ve considered so far – Ukrainian mega-sites, Uruk Mesopotamia, the Indus valley – a dramatic increase in the scale of organized human settlement took place with no resulting concentration of wealth or power in the hands of ruling elites. In short, archaeological research has shifted the burden of proof on to those theorists who claim causal connections between the origins of cities and the rise of stratified states, and whose claims now look increasingly hollow.
需要强调的是,我们并不是说世界上任何地区最早出现的城市都是建立在平等主义原则之上的(事实上,我们很快就会看到一个完美的反例)。我们要说的是,考古证据显示这是一个令人惊讶的常见模式,这与关于规模对人类社会影响的传统进化假设相悖。在我们迄今为止所考虑的每一个案例中 —— 乌克兰大型遗址、乌鲁克美索不达米亚、印度河流域 —— 都发生了有组织的人类定居规模的急剧增长,但并没有导致财富或权力集中在统治精英手中。简而言之,考古研究已经将举证责任转移到那些声称城市的起源和分层国家的崛起之间存在因果关系的理论家身上,而他们的主张现在看起来越来越空洞。
So far we’ve been providing what are effectively a series of snapshot views of cities that, in most cases, were occupied for centuries. It seems unlikely that they did not have their own share of upheavals, transformations and constitutional crises. In some cases we can be certain they did. At Mohenjo-daro, for instance, we know that roughly 200 years before the city’s demise, the Great Bath had already fallen into disrepair. Industrial facilities and ordinary residences crept beyond the Lower Town, on to the Upper Citadel, and even the site of the Bath itself. Within the Lower Town, we now find buildings of truly palatial dimensions with attached craft workshops.103 This ‘other’ Mohenjo-daro existed for generations, and seems to represent a self-conscious project of transforming the city’s (by then centuries-old) hierarchy into something else – though archaeologists have yet to fathom quite what that other thing was supposed to be.
到目前为止,我们已经提供了一系列城市的快照,在大多数情况下,这些城市被占领了几个世纪。他们似乎不太可能没有自己的动荡、变革和宪法危机。在某些情况下,我们可以,他们确实如此。例如,在摩亨佐·达罗,我们知道在城市消亡前大约 200 年,大浴场已经年久失修了。工业设施和普通住宅已经超越了下城,进入了上城,甚至是大浴场本身的所在地。在下城内,我们现在发现了真正的宫殿式建筑,并附有工艺车间。103这个 “另一个” 摩亨佐·达罗存在了几代人,似乎代表了一个自觉的项目,将城市的(当时已有几百年历史的)等级制度转变为其他东西 —— 尽管考古学家还没有完全弄清楚这个其他东西应该是什么。
Like the Ukrainian cities, those of the Indus were eventually abandoned entirely, to be replaced by societies of much smaller scale where heroic aristocrats held sway. In Mesopotamian cities palaces eventually appear. Overall, one might be forgiven for thinking that history was progressing uniformly in an authoritarian direction. And in the very long run it was; at least, by the time we have written histories, lords and kings and would-be world emperors have popped up almost everywhere (though civic institutions and independent cities never entirely go away).104 Still, rushing to this conclusion would be unwise. Dramatic reversals have sometimes taken place in the other direction – for instance in China.
与乌克兰的城市一样,印度河流域的城市最终被完全放弃,取而代之的是规模小得多的社会,英雄贵族们在那里掌权。在美索不达米亚的城市中,最终出现了宫殿。总的来说,人们可能会被原谅,认为历史正朝着专制的方向统一发展。而从长远来看,确实如此;至少,在我们写下历史的时候,领主和国王以及可能成为世界皇帝的人几乎都出现了(尽管公民机构和独立城市从未完全消失)。104不过,匆忙得出这个结论是不明智的。戏剧性的逆转有时发生在另一个方向 —— 例如在中国。
In China, archaeology has opened a yawning chasm between the birth of cities and the appearance of the earliest named royal dynasty, the Shang. Since the early twentieth century discovery of inscribed oracle bones at Anyang in the north-central province of Henan, political history in China has started with the Shang rulers, who came to power around 1200 BC .105 Until quite recently, Shang civilization was thought to be a fusion of earlier urban (‘Erligang’ and ‘Erlitou’) and aristocratic or ‘nomadic’ elements, the latter taking the form of bronze casting techniques, new types of weaponry, and horse-drawn chariots first developed on the Inner Asian steppe, home to a series of powerful and highly mobile societies who played so much havoc with later Chinese history.106
在中国,考古学在城市的诞生和最早的王室王朝 —— 商的出现之间打开了一条巨大的鸿沟。自从二十世纪初在河南中北部的安阳发现甲骨文后,中国的政治历史就从公元前 1200 年左右上台的商代统治者开始。105直到最近,商代文明被认为是早期城市(“二里岗” 和 “二里头”)和贵族或 “游牧” 元素的融合,后者以青铜铸造技术、新型武器和马拉战车的形式首次在内亚草原上发展起来,那里有一系列强大和高度流动的社会,对后来的中国历史产生了巨大的破坏。106
Before the Shang, nothing particularly interesting was supposed to have happened – just a few decades ago, textbooks on early China simply presented a long series of ‘Neolithic’ cultures receding into the distant past, defined by technological trends in farming and stylistic changes in regional traditions of pottery and the design of ritual jades. The underlying assumption was that these were pretty much the same as Neolithic farmers were imagined to be anywhere else: living in villages, developing embryonic forms of social inequality, preparing the way for the sudden leap that would bring the rise of cities and, with cities, the first dynastic states and empires. But we now know this is not what happened at all.
在商代之前,应该没有什么特别有趣的事情发生 —— 就在几十年前,关于早期中国的教科书只是介绍了一长串的 “新石器时代” 文化,它们退到了遥远的过去,由农业的技术趋势和地区传统的陶器和玉器设计的风格变化来定义。基本的假设是,这些文化与其他地方想象的新石器时代的农民差不多:生活在村庄里,发展出社会不平等的雏形,为突然的飞跃做准备,这将带来城市的兴起,并随着城市的兴起,出现第一个王朝国家和帝国。但我们现在知道这根本不是发生的事情。
Today, archaeologists in China speak of a ‘Late Neolithic’ or ‘Longshan’ period marked by what can be described, without equivocation, as cities. Already by 2600 BC we find a spread of settlements surrounded by rammed earth walls across the entire valley of the Yellow River, from the coastal margins of Shandong to the mountains of southern Shanxi. They range in size from centres of more than 300 hectares to tiny principalities, little more than villages but still fortified.107 The major demographic hubs lay far away, on the lower reaches of the Yellow River to the east; also to the west of Henan, in the Fen River valley of Shanxi province; and in the Liangzhu culture of southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang.108
今天,中国的考古学家谈到了 “新石器时代晚期” 或 “龙山” 时期,其特点是可以毫不含糊地描述为城市。早在公元前 2600 年,我们就发现在整个黄河流域,从山东的沿海边缘到山西南部的山区,分布着被夯土墙包围的定居点。它们的规模从超过 300 公顷的中心到小小的公国,比村庄多一点,但仍有防御设施。107主要的人口中心在很远的地方,在东部的黄河下游;也在河南的西部,在山西省的汾河流域;以及在江苏南部和浙江北部的良渚文化。108
Many of the largest Neolithic cities contain cemeteries, where individual burials hold tens or even hundreds of carved ritual jades. These may be badges of office, or perhaps a form of ritual currency: in ancestral rites, the stacking and combination of such jades, often in great number, allowed differences of rank to be measured along a common scale of value, spanning the living and the dead. Accommodating such finds in the annals of written Chinese history proved an uncomfortable task, since we are speaking of a long and apparently tumultuous epoch that just wasn’t supposed to have happened.109
许多最大的新石器时代城市都有墓地,个别墓葬里有几十甚至几百块雕刻的祭祀用玉。这些可能是官职的徽章,也可能是一种仪式上的货币:在祖先的仪式上,这种玉器的堆放和组合,往往数量很多,可以用一个共同的价值尺度来衡量等级的差异,跨越了生者和死者。将这些发现纳入中国的书面历史证明是一项令人不舒服的任务,因为我们说的是一个漫长而明显动荡的时代,只是不应该发生。109
The problem is not merely one of time, but also of space. Astonishingly, some of the most striking ‘Neolithic’ leaps towards urban life are now known to have taken place in the far north, on the frontier with Mongolia. From the perspective of later Chinese empires (and the historians who described them), these regions were already halfway to ‘nomad-barbarian’ and would eventually end up beyond the Great Wall. Nobody expected archaeologists to find there, of all places, a 4,000-year-old city, extending over 400 hectares, with a great stone wall enclosing palaces and a step-pyramid, lording it over a subservient rural hinterland nearly 1,000 years pre-Shang.
这个问题不仅仅是时间的问题,也是空间的问题。令人惊讶的是,一些最引人注目的 “新石器时代” 向城市生活的飞跃,现在已知是发生在遥远的北方,与蒙古的边界。从后来的中国帝国(以及描述它们的历史学家)的角度来看,这些地区已经是 “游牧·野蛮” 的一半了,最终会在长城之外结束。没有人想到,考古学家会在所有地方发现一座有 4000 年历史的城市,面积超过 400 公顷,有一堵,包围着宫殿和一座台阶式金字塔,在商代以前近 1000 年的时间里,统治着一个屈从的农村腹地。
The excavations at Shimao, on the Tuwei River, have revealed all this, along with abundant evidence for sophisticated crafts – including bone-working and bronze-casting – and warfare, including the mass killing and burial of captives, in around 2000 BC .110 Here we sense a much livelier political scene than was ever imagined in the annals of later courtly tradition. Some of it had a grisly aspect, including the decapitation of captured foes, and the burial of some thousands of ancestral jade axes and sceptres in cracks between great stone blocks of the city wall, not to be found or seen again until the prying eyes of archaeologists uncovered them over four millennia later. The likely intention of all this was to disrupt, demoralize and delegitimize rival lineages (‘all in all, you’re just another jade in the wall’).
在土尾河畔的世茂的发掘揭示了这一切,还有大量的证据表明,在公元前 2000 年左右,有复杂的手工业 —— 包括骨加工和青铜铸造 —— 和战争,包括大规模杀害和埋葬俘虏。110在这里,我们感受到一个比后来的宫廷传统史册中所想象的更为活跃的政治场景。其中有一些是残酷的,包括将被俘的敌人斩首,以及将成千上万的祖传玉斧和权杖埋在城墙大石块的缝隙中,直到四千年后考古学家的窥视才发现或看到它们。这一切的目的很可能是为了扰乱、打击和否定竞争对手的血统(“总而言之,你只是墙上的另一块玉”)。
At the site of Taosi – contemporary with Shimao, but located far to the south in the Jinnan basin – we find a rather different story. Between 2300 and 1800 BC, Taosi went through three phases of expansion. First, a fortified town of sixty hectares arose on the ruins of a village, expanding subsequently to a city of 300 hectares. In these early and middle periods, Taosi presents evidence for social stratification almost as dramatic as what we see at Shimao, or indeed what we might expect of a later imperial Chinese capital. There were massive enclosure walls, road systems and large, protected storage areas; also rigid segregation between commoner and elite quarters, with craft workshops and a calendrical monument clustered around what was most likely some sort of palace.
在陶寺遗址 —— 与世茂同时代,但远在津南盆地的南部 —— 我们发现了一个相当不同的故事。在公元前 2300 年至 1800 年间,陶寺经历了三个阶段的扩张。首先,在一个村庄的废墟上出现了一个占地 60 公顷的防御性城镇,随后扩大到一个占地 300 公顷的城市。在这些早期和中期,陶寺呈现出的社会分层的证据几乎和我们在世茂看到的一样引人注目,甚至和我们对后来的中国帝国首都的期望一样。这里有巨大的围墙、道路系统和大型的、受保护的储存区;还有平民区和精英区之间严格的隔离,手工业作坊和历法纪念碑都集中在很可能是某种宫殿周围的地方。
Burials in the early town cemetery of Taosi fell into clearly distinct social classes. Commoner tombs were modest; elite tombs were full of hundreds of lacquered vessels, ceremonial jade axes and remains of extravagant pork feasts. Then suddenly, around 2000 BC, everything seems to change. As the excavator describes it:
陶寺镇早期墓地的墓葬分为明显不同的社会等级。普通人的坟墓很简陋;而精英的坟墓则充满了数以百计的漆器、礼仪用的玉斧和奢侈的猪肉宴的遗迹。然后突然间,在公元前 2000 年左右,一切似乎都变了。正如挖掘者所描述的那样:
The city wall was razed flat, and … the original functional divisions destroyed, resulting in a lack of spatial regulation. Commoners’ residential areas now covered almost the entire site, even reaching beyond the boundaries of the middle-period large city wall. The size of the city became even larger, reaching a total area of 300 hectares. In addition, the ritual area in the south was abandoned. The former palace area now included a poor-quality rammed-earth foundation of about 2,000 square metres, surrounded by trash pits used by relatively low-status people. Stone tool workshops occupied what had been the lower-level elite residential area. The city clearly had lost its status as a capital, and was in a state of anarchy.111
城墙被夷为平地,…… 原有的功能分区被破坏,导致空间监管的缺失。平民的住宅区现在几乎覆盖了整个场地,甚至达到了中期大城墙的边界之外。城市的规模变得更大,总面积达到了 300 公顷。此外,南部的祭祀区被放弃了。以前的宫殿区现在包括一个约 2000 平方米的劣质夯土地基,周围是地位相对较低的人使用的垃圾坑。石器作坊占据了原来的低层精英住宅区。这座城市显然已经失去了其作为首都的地位,处于无政府状态。111
What’s more, there are clues that this was a conscious process of transformation, most likely involving a significant degree of violence. Commoner graves burst in on the elite cemetery, and in the palace district a mass burial, with signs of torture and grotesque violations of the corpses, appears to be evidence for what the excavator describes as an ‘act of political retribution’.112
更重要的是,有线索表明这是一个有意识的改造过程,很可能涉及到相当程度的暴力。平民的坟墓突然出现在精英的墓地上,而在宫殿区的一个集体埋葬中,有酷刑的痕迹和对尸体的怪异侵犯,似乎是挖掘者所描述的 “政治报复行为” 的证据。112
Now, it is considered bad form to question an excavator’s first-hand judgement about a site, but we cannot resist a couple of observations. First, the ostensible ‘state of anarchy’ (elsewhere described as ‘collapse and chaos’)113 lasted for a considerable period of time, between two and three centuries. Second, the overall size of Taosi during the latter period actually grew from 280 to 300 hectares. This sounds a lot less like collapse than an age of widespread prosperity, following the abolition of a rigid class system. It suggests that after the destruction of the palace, people did not fall into a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ but simply got on with their lives – presumably under what they considered a more equitable system of local self-governance.
现在,质疑一个挖掘者对一个遗址的第一手判断被认为是不好的,但我们不能不提出一些看法。首先,表面上的 “无政府状态”(在其他地方被描述为 “崩溃和混乱”)持续了相当长的时间,在两到三个世纪之间。113持续了相当长的时间,在两到三个世纪之间。第二,在后一个时期,陶寺的总面积实际上从 280 公顷增加到 300 公顷。这听起来不像是崩溃,倒像是废除了僵化的阶级制度后的一个普遍繁荣的时代。这表明,在宫殿被摧毁后,人们并没有陷入霍布斯式的 “全民战争”,而是继续生活 —— 大概是在他们认为更公平的地方自治制度下。
Here, on the banks of the Fen River, we might conceivably be in the presence of evidence for the world’s first documented social revolution, or at least the first in an urban setting. Other interpretations are no doubt possible. But at the very least, the case of Taosi invites us to consider the world’s earliest cities as places of self-conscious social experimentation, where very different visions of what a city could be like might clash – sometimes peacefully, sometimes erupting in bursts of extraordinary violence. Increasing the number of people living in one place may vastly increase the range of social possibilities, but in no sense does it predetermine which of those possibilities will ultimately be realized.
在这里,在汾河岸边,我们可以想象到世界上第一次有记载的社会革命的证据,或者至少是第一次在城市环境中的社会革命。其他解释无疑是可能的。但至少,陶西的案例让我们把世界上最早的城市看作是自觉的社会实验场所,在那里,对城市的不同看法可能会发生冲突 —— 有时是和平的,有时则爆发出异常的暴力。增加生活在一个地方的人数可能会大大增加社会可能性的范围,但在任何意义上,它都不会预先决定这些可能性中的哪一个最终会被实现。
As we’ll see in the next chapter, the history of central Mexico suggests that the kinds of revolution we’ve been talking about – urban revolutions of the political kind – may well be a lot more common in human history than we tend to think. Again, we may never be able fully to reconstruct the unwritten constitutions of the earliest cities to appear in various parts of the world, or the reforms undergone in their first centuries, but we can no longer doubt that these existed.
正如我们将在下一章看到的那样,墨西哥中部的历史表明,我们一直在谈论的那种革命 —— 政治类的城市革命 —— 在人类历史上很可能比我们倾向于认为的要常见得多。同样,我们可能永远无法完全重建世界各地最早出现的城市的不成文宪法,或在其最初几个世纪所经历的改革,但我们不能再怀疑这些存在。
The indigenous origins of social housing and democracy in the Americas
Sometime around AD 1150, a people called the Mexica migrated south from a place called Aztlán – its location is now unknown – to take up a new home in the heart of the Valley of Mexico, which now bears their name.1 There they were eventually to carve out an empire, the Aztec Triple Alliance,2 and build its capital at Tenochtitlan, an island-city in Lake Texcoco – one link in a chain of great lakes and lake-cities, and part of an urban landscape ringed by mountains. Lacking an urban tradition of their own, the Mexica modelled the layout of Tenochtitlan on that of another city they found, lying in ruins and virtually abandoned, in a valley about one day’s journey distant. They called that other city Teotihuacan, the ‘Place of Gods’.
大约在公元 1150 年的某个时候,一个叫做墨西哥人的民族从一个叫做阿兹特兰的地方向南迁徙 —— 其位置现在不详 —— 在墨西哥谷地的中心地带建立了新的家园,现在这个地方以他们的名字命名。1他们最终在那里建立了一个帝国,即阿兹特克三国联盟。2并在特诺奇蒂特兰(Tenochtitlan)建都,这是特斯科科湖中的一个岛屿城市 —— 大湖和湖泊城市链中的一个环节,也是被山脉环绕的城市景观的一部分。由于缺乏自己的城市传统,墨西哥人将特诺奇蒂特兰的布局与他们发现的另一座城市的布局相仿,该城市处于废墟之中,几乎被遗弃,位于距此约一天路程的山谷里。他们把那座城市称为特奥蒂瓦坎,即 “众神之地”。
It had been some time since anyone lived in Teotihuacan. By the twelfth century, when the Mexica arrived, nobody even seems to have remembered the city’s original name. Still, the new arrivals clearly found the city – with its two colossal pyramids set against the Cerro Gordo – both alien and alluring, and far too large simply to ignore. Their response, aside from using it as a model for their own great city, was to veil Teotihuacan in myth, and cage its standing remains in a dense forest of names and symbols. As a result, we still see Teotihuacan largely through Aztec (Culhua-Mexica) eyes.3
自从有人在特奥蒂瓦坎居住以来,已经有一段时间了。到了 12 世纪,当墨西哥人来到这里时,似乎甚至没有人记得这个城市的原名。不过,新来的人显然发现这座城市 —— 它的两座巨大的金字塔与 Cerro Gordo 相映成趣 —— 既陌生又诱人,而且规模太大,根本无法忽视。他们的反应,除了把它作为他们自己伟大城市的模型之外,就是把特奥蒂瓦坎笼罩在神话中,并把它的遗迹关在名字和符号的密林里。因此,我们在很大程度上还是通过阿兹特克人(Culhua-Mexica)的眼睛来看特奥蒂瓦坎。3
Written references to Teotihuacan from the time it was still inhabited comprise a few tantalizing inscriptions from far to the east in the Maya lowlands, which call it ‘the place of cattail reeds’, corresponding to the Nahuatl word ‘Tollan’ and evoking a primordial, perfect city by the water.4 Otherwise all we have are sixteenth-century transcriptions of chronicles, set down in Spanish and Nahuatl, which describe Teotihuacan as a place full of mountain pools and primal voids, from which the planets sprang at the beginning of time. The planets were followed by gods, and the gods by a mysterious race of fish-men, whose world had to be destroyed to make way for our own.
从特奥蒂瓦坎仍有人居住的时候起,关于它的书面记载就包括来自遥远的东方玛雅低地的一些诱人的铭文,这些铭文称其为 “蒲苇之地”,与纳瓦特尔语的 “Tollan” 相对应,令人想起一个原始的、完美的水边城市。4除此之外,我们只有十六世纪用西班牙语和纳瓦特尔语抄写的编年史,其中,将特奥蒂瓦坎描述为一个充满山间水池和原始空隙的地方,在时间之初,行星就从这里涌现。行星之后是神,而神之后是神秘的鱼人种族,他们的世界不得不被摧毁,为我们的世界让路。
In historical terms, such sources are not very useful, especially since we have no way of knowing if these myths were ever told in the city when it was actually inhabited, or whether they were just invented by the Aztecs. Still, the legacy of those stories continues. It was the Aztecs, for instance, who made up the names ‘Pyramid of the Sun’, ‘Pyramid of the Moon’ and ‘Way of the Dead’, which archaeologists and tourists alike use to this day when describing the city’s most visible monuments and the road that links them all.5
就历史而言,这样的资料并不十分有用,特别是我们无从得知这些神话是否在城市真正有人居住时曾被讲述过,还是只是阿兹特克人的发明。不过,这些故事的遗产仍在继续。例如,正是阿兹特克人创造了 “太阳金字塔”、“月亮金字塔” 和 “死亡之路” 等名称,至今考古学家和游客在描述这座城市最明显的遗迹和连接它们的道路时都使用这些名称。5
For all their facility with astronomical calculation, the builders of Tenochtitlan either didn’t know or didn’t find it important to know when, precisely, Teotihuacan had last been inhabited. Here, at least, archaeology has been able to fill in the gaps. We know now that the city of Teotihuacan had its heyday eight centuries before the coming of the Mexica, and more than 1,000 years before the arrival of the Spanish. Its foundation dates to around 100 BC, and its decline to around AD 600. We also know that, in the course of those centuries, Teotihuacan became a city of such grandeur and sophistication that it could easily be put on a par with Rome at the height of its imperial power.
尽管特诺奇蒂特兰的建设者们在天文计算方面很有一套,但他们要么不知道,要么觉得不应该知道特奥蒂瓦坎最后一次有人居住的确切时间。至少在这方面,考古学已经能够填补空白。我们现在知道,特奥蒂瓦坎城在墨西哥人到来之前的 8 个世纪,以及西班牙人到来之前的 1000 多年,就已经有了它的全盛时期。它的建立可以追溯到公元前 100 年左右,而它的衰落可以追溯到公元 600 年左右。我们还知道,在这几个世纪中,特奥蒂瓦坎成为一个如此宏伟和先进的城市,它可以很容易地与罗马的帝国力量的高峰相提并论。
We don’t actually know if Teotihuacan was, like Rome, the centre of a great empire, but even conservative estimates place its population at around 100,0006 (perhaps as much as five times the likely population of Mohenjo-daro, Uruk or any of the other early Eurasian cities we discussed in the last chapter). At its zenith, there were probably at least a million people distributed across the Valley of Mexico and surrounding lands, many of whom had only visited the great city once, or perhaps only knew someone who had, but nonetheless considered Teotihuacan the most important place in the entire world.
我们实际上不知道特奥蒂瓦坎是否像罗马一样是一个大帝国的中心,但即使是保守的估计,其人口也在 10 万左右。6(也许是摩亨佐·达罗、乌鲁克或我们在上一章中讨论的任何其他早期欧亚城市人口的五倍。)在其鼎盛时期,可能至少有一百万人分布在墨西哥谷地和周围的土地上,其中许多人只参观过这座伟大的城市一次,或者可能只知道有人参观过,但仍然认为特奥蒂瓦坎是整个世界上最重要的地方。
This much is broadly accepted by virtually every scholar and historian of ancient Mexico. More controversial is the question of what sort of city Teotihuacan was, and how it was governed. Pose this question to a specialist in the study of Mesoamerican history or archaeology (as we often have done), and you’ll likely get the same reaction: a roll of the eyes and a resigned acknowledgement that there’s just something ‘weird’ about the place. Not merely because of its exceptional size, but because of its stubborn refusal to conform to expectations of how an early Mesoamerican city should have functioned.
这一点几乎被所有研究古代墨西哥的学者和历史学家广泛接受。更有争议的是特奥蒂瓦坎是一个什么样的城市,以及它是如何被管理的问题。向研究中美洲历史或考古的专家提出这个问题(就像我们经常做的那样),你可能会得到同样的反应:翻白眼,并无奈地承认这个地方有些 “奇怪”。这不仅仅是因为它的特殊规模,还因为它顽固地拒绝符合人们对早期中美洲城市应该如何运作的期望。
At this point, the reader can probably guess what’s coming. All the evidence suggests that Teotihuacan had, at its height of its power, found a way to govern itself without overlords – as did the much earlier cities of prehistoric Ukraine, Uruk-period Mesopotamia and Bronze Age Pakistan. Yet it did so with a very different technological foundation, and on an even larger scale.
在这一点上,读者大概能猜到会发生什么。所有的证据都表明,特奥蒂瓦坎在其最强大的时候,找到了一种没有霸主的自我管理方式 —— 就像史前乌克兰、乌鲁克时期的美索不达米亚和青铜时代的巴基斯坦等更早的城市一样。然而,它是在一个非常不同的技术基础上实现的,而且规模更大。
But first some background.
但首先需要一些背景。
As we’ve seen, when kings appear in the historical record, they tend to leave unmistakeable traces. We can expect to find palaces, rich burials and monuments celebrating their conquests. All this is true in Mesoamerica as well.
正如我们所看到的,当国王出现在历史记录中时,他们往往会留下难以辨认的痕迹。我们可以期望找到宫殿、丰富的墓葬和庆祝其征服的纪念碑。这一切在中美洲也是如此。
In the wider region, the paradigm is set by a series of dynastic polities, located far from the Valley of Mexico in the Yucatán Peninsula and adjacent highlands. Today’s historians know these polities as the Classic Maya (c .AD 150–900 – the term ‘classic’ is also applied to their ancient written language and to the chronological period in question). Cities like Tikal, Calakmul or Palenque were dominated by royal temples, ball-courts (settings for competitive, sometimes lethal games), images of war and humiliated captives (often publicly killed after ball games), complex calendrical rituals celebrating royal ancestors, and records of the deeds and biographies of living kings. In the modern imagination this has become the ‘standard package’ of Mesoamerican kingship, associated with ancient cities throughout the region from Monte Alban (in Oaxaca, c .AD 500–800) to Tula (in central Mexico, c .AD 850–1150), and arguably reaching as far north as Cahokia (near what’s now East St Louis, c .AD 800–1200).
在更广泛的地区,范式是由一系列的王朝政体设定的,这些政体位于远离墨西哥谷地的尤卡坦半岛和邻近的高地。今天的历史学家将这些政体称为古典玛雅(公元 150-900 年 —— “古典” 一词也适用于他们古老的书面语言和有关的时间段。)像提卡尔(Tikal)、卡拉克穆尔(Calakmul)或帕伦克(Palenque)这样的城市被皇家寺庙、球场(竞争性的、有时是致命的游戏的场所)、战争和被羞辱的俘虏(通常在球赛后被公开杀害)的图像、庆祝皇家祖先的复杂的历法仪式,以及在世国王的事迹和传记的记录所支配。在现代人的想象中,这已经成为中美洲王权的 “标准包装”,与整个地区的古城有关,从蒙特阿尔班(位于瓦哈卡州,约公元 500-800 年)到图拉(位于墨西哥中部,约公元 850-1150 年),甚至可以说北至卡霍基亚(靠近现在的东圣路易,约公元 800-1200 年)。
In Teotihuacan, all this seems to have been strikingly absent. Unlike in the Mayan cities, there are few written inscriptions in general.7 (For this reason, we don’t know what language was spoken by the majority of Teotihuacan’s inhabitants, although we know the city was sufficiently cosmopolitan to include among its population both Maya and Zapotec minorities familiar with the use of writing.)8 However, there remains plenty of pictorial art. Teotihuacan’s citizens were prolific craft specialists and makers of images, leaving behind everything from monumental stone sculptures to diminutive terracotta figures that could be held in the palm, as well as vivid wall paintings bustling with human activity (picture something like the carnivalesque feel of a Bruegel street scene and you are not too far off). Still, nowhere among some thousands of such images do we find even a single representation of a ruler striking, binding or otherwise dominating a subordinate – unlike in the contemporary arts of the Maya and Zapotec, where this is a constant theme. Today scholars pore over Teotihuacan imagery, searching for anything that might be construed as a kingly figure, but largely they fail. In many cases the artists seem to have deliberately frustrated such efforts, for instance by making all the figures in a given scene exactly the same size.
在特奥蒂瓦坎,这一切似乎都是惊人的缺席。与玛雅人的城市不同,一般来说,很少有书面的铭文。7(由于这个原因,我们不知道特奥蒂瓦坎的大多数居民说的是什么语言,尽管我们知道这个城市有足够的国际性,在其人口中包括熟悉使用文字的玛雅和萨波特克少数民族。)8然而,仍然有大量的绘画艺术。特奥蒂瓦坎的公民是多产的手工艺专家和图像制造者,他们留下了从不朽的石雕到可以握在手中的小型陶俑,以及生动的人类活动的壁画(想象一下类似于布鲁盖尔街景的狂欢节的感觉,你就不会太远)。然而,在数以千计的此类图像中,我们没有发现哪怕是一个统治者殴打、捆绑或以其他方式支配下属的表现 —— 与玛雅和萨波特克的当代艺术不同,这是一个永恒的主题。今天,学者们仔细研究特奥蒂瓦坎的图像,寻找任何可能被理解为国王形象的东西,但他们基本上没有成功。在许多情况下,艺术家们似乎故意挫败这种努力,例如,在一个特定的场景中,所有的人物都是完全相同的尺寸。
Another key element of royal display in the ancient kingdoms of Mesoamerica, the ceremonial ball-court is also conspicuous by its absence at Teotihuacan.9 Neither has there been found any equivalent to the great tombs of Sihyaj Chan K’awiil at Tikal or K’inich Janaab Pakal in Palenque. And not for lack of trying. Archaeologists have combed through the ancient tunnels around the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon and under the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, only to discover that the passages do not lead to royal tombs, or even robbed-out tomb chambers, but to chthonic labyrinths and mineral-crusted shrines: evocations of other worlds, no doubt, but not the graves of sacred rulers.10
在中美洲的古代王国中,皇家展示的另一个关键因素是仪式性的球馆,在特奥蒂瓦坎也是明显的缺席。9也没有发现与提卡尔的 Sihyaj Chan K‘awiil 或帕伦克的 K’inich Janaab Pakal 的大墓相当的东西。这并不是因为缺乏尝试。考古学家在太阳金字塔和月亮金字塔周围以及羽蛇神庙下的古代隧道中进行了梳理,结果发现这些通道并不通往皇室墓穴,甚至也不通往被盗的墓室,而是通往地狱般的迷宫和矿物外壳的神龛:毫无疑问,这是其他世界的召唤,但不是神圣的统治者的坟墓。10
Some have suggested that the self-conscious rejection of outside convention at Teotihuacan runs even deeper. For instance, the city’s artists appear to have been aware of formal and compositional principles found among their Mesoamerican neighbours, and to have set about deliberately inverting them. Where Maya and Zapotec art draws on a tradition of relief carving derived from the earlier Olmec kings of Veracruz, favouring curves and flowing forms, the sculpture of Teotihuacan shows humans and humanoid figures as flat composites, tightly fitted to angular blocks. Some decades ago, these contrasts led Esther Pasztory – a Hungarian-American art historian who spent much of her career studying Teotihuacan’s art and imagery – to a radical conclusion. What we have, she argued, with highland Teotihuacan and the lowland Maya, is nothing less than a case of conscious cultural inversion – or what we’ve been calling schismogenesis – but this time on the scale of urban civilizations.11
有些人认为,特奥蒂瓦坎对外部惯例的自觉拒绝甚至更深。例如,该城市的艺术家们似乎已经意识到了他们在中美洲邻国中发现的形式和构图原则,并开始有意颠覆它们。玛雅人和萨波特克人的艺术借鉴了早期韦拉克鲁斯的奥尔梅克国王的浮雕传统,倾向于曲线和流动的形式,而特奥蒂瓦坎的雕塑则将人类和类人形象表现为扁平的组合体,紧紧地贴在有棱有角的块体上。几十年前,这些对比导致埃斯特·帕斯托里 —— 一位匈牙利裔美洲艺术史学家,在其职业生涯中大部分时间都在研究特奥蒂瓦坎的艺术和图像 —— 得出了一个激进的结论。她认为,我们所拥有的特奥蒂瓦坎高地和低地玛雅,无非是一个有意识的文化颠倒的案例 —— 或者我们称之为分裂的发生 —— 但这次是在城市文明的规模上。11
Teotihuacan, in Pasztory’s view, created a new tradition of art to express the ways in which its society was different from that of its contemporaries elsewhere in Mesoamerica. In doing so it rejected both the specific visual trope of ruler and captive and the glorification of aristocratic individuals in general. In this it was strikingly different from both the earlier cultural tradition of the Olmec, and from contemporary Maya polities. If the visual arts of Teotihuacan celebrated anything, Pasztory insisted, then it was the community as a whole and its collective values, which – over a period of some centuries – successfully prevented the emergence of ‘dynastic personality cults’.12
在帕斯托里看来,特奥蒂瓦坎创造了一个新的艺术传统,以表达其社会与同时代中美洲其他地方的社会的不同之处。在这样做的过程中,它既拒绝了统治者和俘虏的特定视觉模式,也拒绝了对一般贵族个人的美化。在这一点上,它与早期的奥尔梅克文化传统和当代的玛雅政体都有明显的不同。帕斯托里坚持认为,如果特奥蒂瓦坎的视觉艺术庆祝什么的话,那就是整个社区及其集体价值观,在几个世纪的时间里,成功地防止了 “王朝的个人崇拜” 的出现。12
According to Pasztory, Teotihuacan was not just ‘anti-dynastic’ in spirit, it was itself a utopian experiment in urban life. Those who created it thought of themselves as creating a new and different kind of city, a Tollan for the people, without overlords or kings. Following in Pasztory’s footsteps, other scholars, eliminating virtually every other possibility, arrived at similar conclusions. In its early years, they concluded, Teotihuacan had gone some way down the road to authoritarian rule, but then around AD 300 suddenly reversed course: possibly there was a revolution of sorts, followed by a more equal distribution of the city’s resources and the establishment of a kind of ‘collective governance’.13
根据帕斯托里的说法,特奥蒂瓦坎不仅在精神上 “反叛逆”,它本身就是城市生活中的一个乌托邦实验。创造它的人认为自己创造了一个新的和不同的城市,一个为人民服务的托兰,没有霸主或国王。跟随帕斯托里的脚步,其他学者在排除了几乎所有其他可能性之后,得出了类似的结论。他们的结论是,特奥蒂瓦坎在其早期曾在某种程度上走向专制统治,但在公元 300 年左右突然扭转了方向:可能发生了某种革命,随后城市的资源得到了更平等的分配,并建立了一种 “集体治理”。13
The general consensus among those who know the site best is that Teotihuacan was, in fact, a city organized along some sort of self-consciously egalitarian lines. And, as we’ve seen, in world-historical terms all this is not nearly as weird or anomalous as scholars – or anyone else, for that matter – tend to assume. It is equally true if we simply try to understand Teotihuacan within its Mesoamerican context. The city didn’t come out of nowhere. While there might be a recognizable ‘package’ of Mesoamerican kingship, there also appears to have been a very different, dare we say republican, tradition as well.
那些最了解该遗址的人的普遍共识是,特奥蒂瓦坎实际上是一个按照某种自觉的平等主义路线组织的城市。而且,正如我们所看到的,从世界历史的角度来看,这一切并不像学者们 —— 或其他任何人 —— 倾向于假设的那样奇怪或反常。如果我们只是试图在中美洲的背景下理解特奥蒂瓦坎,这同样是正确的。这座城市并不是凭空出现的。虽然可能有一个可识别的中美洲王权的 “包”,但似乎也有一个非常不同的,我们敢说是共和制的传统。
What we propose to do in this chapter, then, is bring to the surface this neglected strand of Mesoamerican social history: one of urban republics, large-scale projects of social welfare, and indigenous forms of democracy that can be followed down to the time of the Spanish conquest and beyond.
因此,我们在这一章中建议做的是,将中美洲社会历史中被忽视的部分浮出水面:城市共和国、大规模的社会福利项目以及土著形式的民主,可以一直追溯到西班牙征服时期及以后。
Let us start by leaving behind the city itself, and the valleys and plateaus of central Mexico, for the tropical forest kingdoms of the Classic Maya, whose ruins lie to the east: in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, and within the modern countries of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. In the fifth century AD, something remarkable happens in the art and writing of some of these Maya city-states, including the largest and most prominent among them, Tikal.
让我们先抛开城市本身以及墨西哥中部的山谷和高原,去看看古典玛雅的热带森林王国,其遗址位于东部:墨西哥的尤卡坦半岛,以及危地马拉、伯利兹、洪都拉斯和萨尔瓦多等现代国家内。在公元 五世纪,这些玛雅城邦中的一些城邦,包括其中最大和最突出的提卡尔,在艺术和文字方面发生了一些引人注目的事情。
Finely carved scenes on Mayan monuments of this period show figures seated on thrones, and wearing what can be instantly recognized as foreign, Teotihuacan-style dress and weaponry (the spear-throwers called atlatls, feathered shields, and so on), clearly distinct from the garb and finery of local rulers. Archaeologists working in western Honduras, near the border with Guatemala, have even unearthed what, judging by the grave goods, appear to be the actual burials of these stranger-kings at the base level of a temple at the site of Copán, which went through seven further phases of construction. Here, glyphic inscriptions describe at least some of these individuals as actually coming from the Land of the Cattail Reeds.14
这一时期玛雅古迹上的精雕细刻的场景显示了坐在宝座上的人物,他们穿着一眼就能看出是外来的、特奥蒂瓦坎风格的服装和武器(称为 atlatls 的投矛器、羽毛盾牌等),明显有别于当地统治者的服装和装饰品。在洪都拉斯西部与危地马拉交界处工作的考古学家甚至在科潘遗址的一座神庙底层出土了从墓葬物品来看似乎是这些异族国王的真实墓葬,该神庙又经历了七个阶段的建造。在这里,石刻碑文描述了这些人中至少有一些人实际上是来自于猫尾巴芦苇之国。14
Two things (at least) are very hard to explain here. First, why are there images of what appear to be Teotihuacano lords on thrones in Tikal, when there are no similar images of lords sitting on thrones at Teotihuacan itself? Second, how could Teotihuacan ever have mounted a successful military expedition against a kingdom over 600 miles away? Most experts assume the latter was simply impossible on logistical grounds, and they are probably correct to do so (although we should keep an open mind; after all, who could have predicted on logistical grounds that a motley crew of Spaniards would bring down a Mesoamerican empire of many millions?). The first question certainly requires more careful consideration. Were the individuals depicted as seated kings really from central Mexico at all?
这里有两件事(至少)是很难解释的。首先,为什么在蒂卡尔有似乎是特奥蒂瓦坎诸侯的图像,而在特奥蒂瓦坎本身却没有类似的诸侯坐在宝座上的图像?第二,特奥蒂瓦坎怎么可能对 600 多英里外的王国进行成功的军事远征?大多数专家认为后者在后勤方面根本不可能,他们这样做可能是正确的(尽管我们应该保持开放的心态;毕竟,谁能在后勤方面预测到一队西班牙人的杂牌军会把一个拥有数百万人口的中美洲帝国打倒 )。第一个问题当然需要更仔细的考虑。被描绘为坐着的国王的人是否真的来自墨西哥中部?
It’s possible we are just dealing here with local lords who had a taste for exotica. We know from art and inscriptions that Maya grandees sometimes enjoyed dressing up in Teotihuacan warrior gear, sometimes beheld visions of Teotihuacan spirits after ritual bloodletting, and generally liked to style themselves ‘Lords and Ladies of the West’. The city was certainly far enough away for the Maya to see it as a place of exotic fantasies, some kind of distant Shangri-La. But there are reasons to suspect it was more than just that. For one thing, people did regularly move back and forth. Obsidian from Teotihuacan adorned the Maya gods, and Teotihuacan’s deities wore green quetzal feathers from the Maya lowlands. Mercenaries and traders went both ways, pilgrimages and diplomatic visits followed; immigrants from Teotihuacan built temples in Maya cities, and there was even a Maya neighbourhood, replete with murals, at Teotihuacan itself.15
在这里,我们有可能只是在处理那些对异国情调有兴趣的地方领主。我们从艺术和铭文中得知,玛雅大人物有时喜欢穿上特奥蒂瓦坎的武士服,有时在放血仪式后看到特奥蒂瓦坎的神灵,而且一般喜欢把自己打扮成 “西方的贵族和女士”。对于玛雅人来说,这座城市当然足够遥远,可以把它看作是一个充满异国情调的幻想之地,某种遥远的香格里拉。但我们有理由怀疑它不仅仅是这样。首先,人们确实经常来回走动。来自特奥蒂瓦坎的黑曜石装饰着玛雅的神灵,而特奥蒂瓦坎的神灵则佩戴着来自玛雅低地的绿色格查尔鸟羽毛。雇佣兵和商人双向往来,朝圣和外交访问接踵而至;来自特奥蒂瓦坎的移民在玛雅城市建造了寺庙,甚至在特奥蒂瓦坎本身也有一个玛雅街区,其中充满了壁画。15
How do we resolve the puzzle of this Mayan depiction of Teotihuacan kings? Well, first of all, if history teaches us anything about long-distance trade routes, it’s that they are likely to be full of unscrupulous characters of various sorts: bandits, runaways, grifters, smugglers, religious visionaries, spies – or figures who may be any combination of these at a given time. This was no less true in Mesoamerica than anywhere else. The Aztecs, for instance, employed orders of heavily armed warrior-merchants called pochteca, who also gathered intelligence on the cities where they traded.
我们如何解决这个玛雅人对特奥蒂瓦坎国王的描绘之谜?好吧,首先,如果历史告诉我们关于长途贸易路线的任何事情,那就是它们很可能充满了各种不择手段的人物:强盗、逃亡者、漂泊者、走私者、宗教异象者、间谍 —— 或者在特定时间可能是这些人的任何组合。在中美洲,这种情况并不比其他地方少。例如,阿兹特克人雇用了全副武装的武士 —— 商人,他们被称为 pochteca,也收集他们交易的城市的情报。
History is also full of stories of adventurous travellers who either find themselves taken into some alien society and miraculously transformed there into kings or embodiments of sacred power: ‘stranger-kings’ like Captain James Cook, who – on casting anchor in Hawaii in 1779 – was accorded the status of an ancient Polynesian fertility god called Lono; or others who, like Hernán Cortés, did their best to convince local people that they should be welcomed as such.16 Worldwide, a remarkably large percentage of dynastic histories begin precisely this way, with a man (it’s almost always a man) who mysteriously appears from somewhere far away. It is easy to see how an adventurous traveller from a famous city might have taken advantage of such notions. Could something like this have happened in the Maya lowlands in the fifth century AD ?
历史上也充满了冒险家的故事,他们要么发现自己被带到了某个异国社会,并奇迹般地在那里变成了国王或神圣力量的化身:像詹姆斯·库克船长这样的 “异国国王”,1779 年在夏威夷抛锚后,被赋予了一个名为 Lono 的古代波利尼西亚生育神的地位;或者像埃尔南·科尔特斯那样,竭尽全力说服当地人,他们应该受到这样的欢迎。16在世界范围内,有相当大比例的王朝历史正是以这种方式开始的,一个男人(几乎总是一个男人)从遥远的地方神秘地出现。很容易看出,一个来自著名城市的冒险的旅行者可能会利用这种观念。这样的事情会不会发生在公元五世纪的玛雅低地?
From inscriptions at Tikal, we do know the names of some of these particular stranger-kings and their close associates, or at least the names they adopted as Maya nobles. One, called Sihyaj K’ahk’ (‘Born of Fire’), seems never himself to have ruled but helped install a series of Teotihuacano ‘princes’ on Maya thrones, including the throne of Tikal. We also know that these princes married local women of high rank, and that their offspring became Maya rulers, who also celebrated their ancestral connection to Teotihuacan: the ‘Tollan of the West’.
从提卡尔的铭文中,我们确实知道其中一些特殊的异族国王及其亲信的名字,或者至少知道他们作为玛雅贵族所采用的名字。其中一个叫 Sihyaj K‘ahk’(“生而为火”)的人似乎从未统治过自己,但却帮助将一系列特奥蒂瓦卡人的 “王子” 安置在玛雅的王位上,包括提卡尔的王位。我们还知道,这些王子与当地的高级妇女结婚,他们的后代成为玛雅统治者,他们也庆祝他们与特奥蒂瓦坎的祖先联系:“西部的托兰”。
From examination of burials at Copán we also know that, before their elevation to royal status, at least some of these adventurous individuals led extremely colourful lives, fighting and travelling and fighting again, and that they may not originally have come either from Copán or from Teotihuacan but somewhere else entirely.17 Taking all lines of evidence into account, it seems likely that these progenitors of Maya dynasties were originally members of groups that specialized in long-distance travel – traders, soldiers of fortune, missionaries or perhaps even spies – who, perhaps quite suddenly, found themselves elevated to royalty.18
通过对科潘墓葬的检查,我们还知道,在他们被提升到王室地位之前,这些冒险家中至少有一些人过着极其丰富多彩的生活,战斗、旅行、再战斗,而且他们最初可能不是来自科潘或特奥蒂瓦坎,而是来自其他地方。17考虑到所有的证据,这些玛雅王朝的祖先似乎很可能最初是专门从事长途旅行的群体成员 —— 商人、幸运战士、传教士,甚至可能是间谍 —— 他们也许很突然地发现自己被提升为皇室成员。18
There is a remarkable analogy for this process closer to our times. Many centuries later, when the focus of Maya culture – and most of its largest cities – had shifted to Yucatán in the north, a similar wave of central Mexican influence occurred, most dramatically evident in the city of Chichén Itzá, whose Temple of the Warriors seems to be directly modelled on the Toltec capital of Tula (a later Tollan). Again, we don’t really know what happened, but later chronicles, written secretly under Spanish rule, described the Itzá in almost exactly these terms: as a band of uprooted warriors, ‘stuttering foreigners’ from the west, who managed to seize control of a series of cities in Yucatán and ended up in a prolonged rivalry with another dynasty of Toltec exiles – or at least, exiles who insisted they were originally Toltec – called the Xiu.19 These chronicles are full of accounts of the exiles’ wanderings in the wilderness, temporary periods of glory, accusations of oppression, and sombre prophecies of future tribulation. Once again, we seem to be dealing with a feeling among the Maya that kings really should come from somewhere far away, and with the willingness of at least a few unscrupulous foreigners to take advantage of this idea.
在离我们这个时代更近的地方,对这个过程有一个显著的比喻。许多世纪后,当玛雅文化的重点 —— 以及其最大的城市 —— 转移到北部的尤卡坦时,发生了类似的墨西哥中部影响的浪潮,在奇琴·伊察城最为明显,其勇士神庙似乎直接仿效了托尔特克的首都图拉(后来的托兰)。同样,我们也不知道发生了什么,但后来在西班牙统治下秘密撰写的编年史几乎完全是这样描述伊察人的:他们是一群背井离乡的战士,来自西方的 “口吃的外国人”,他们设法控制了尤卡坦的一系列城市,最终与托尔特克的另一个流亡王朝 —— 或者至少是坚持自己是托尔特克人的流亡者 —— 称为修族进行了长期的竞争。19这些编年史充满了对流亡者在旷野中流浪的描述、暂时的荣耀、对压迫的指责以及对未来苦难的忧郁预言。再一次,我们似乎在处理玛雅人的一种感觉,即国王真的应该来自遥远的地方,而且至少有几个不择手段的外国人愿意利用这种想法。
All this is only guesswork. Still, it’s clear the images and records from places like Tikal tell us more about Maya concepts of royal power than they do about Teotihuacan itself, where not a shred of compelling evidence for the institution of kingship has yet been found. The ‘Mexican’ princes of the Maya lowlands, bedecked in regalia and seated on thrones, were engaging in exactly the sort of grandiose political gestures that had no place in their putative homeland. If not a monarchy, then, what was Teotihuacan? There is, we suggest, no one answer to this question – and over a period of five centuries there is no particular reason why there ought to be.
所有这些都只是猜测。不过,很明显,来自蒂卡尔等地的图像和记录比特奥蒂瓦坎本身告诉我们更多关于玛雅王权的概念,在那里还没有发现关于王权制度的一丝令人信服的证据。玛雅低地的 “墨西哥” 王子们,身着盛装,坐在宝座上,所从事的正是在他们的祖国没有地位的那种宏大的政治姿态。如果不是君主制,那么,特奥蒂瓦坎是什么?我们认为,这个问题没有唯一的答案 —— 而且在五个世纪的时间里,也没有特别的理由说明应该有答案。
Let’s look at a central portion of the standard architectural plan of Teotihuacan, pieced together from the most exhaustive survey of an urban landscape ever undertaken by archaeologists.20 Having gone to the lengths of recording a built environment on that scale – all eight square miles of it – archaeologists naturally want to see it all at once, in a single gasp. Modern archaeology often presents to us something like the chronologically collapsed plan of Mohenjo-daro and other ‘first cities’ with centuries or even millennia of urban history folded into a single map. It’s visually stunning, but actually quite flat and artificial. In the case of Teotihuacan, it gives an effect at once harmonious and misleading.
让我们来看看特奥蒂瓦坎标准建筑图的中心部分,它是由考古学家对城市景观进行的最详尽的调查拼凑而成的。20考古学家不遗余力地记录如此规模的建筑环境 —— 全部 8 平方英里 —— 自然希望一次看个够,一气呵成。现代考古学经常向我们展示类似摩亨佐·达罗和其他 “第一城市” 的按时间顺序排列的计划,将几个世纪甚至几千年的城市历史折叠在一张地图上。这在视觉上是惊人的,但实际上是相当平坦和人为的。在特奥蒂瓦坎的案例中,它给人的效果既和谐又误导。
At the centre, anchoring the whole mirage, stand the great monuments – the two Pyramids and the Ciudadela (Citadel) containing the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Extending for miles around are smaller but still impressively appointed residences that housed the city’s population: some 2,000 multi-family apartments, finely built from stone masonry and organized on a tidy orthogonal grid, aligned to the ceremonial centre of the city. It is an almost perfectly functional image of civic prosperity and hierarchy. We are, it would seem, in the presence of something like More’s Utopia or Campanella’s City of the Sun . But there is a problem. The residences and pyramids do not strictly belong together, or at least not all of them. Their construction occupies different phases of time. Nor is the temple quite what it seems.
在中心地带,整个海市蜃楼都矗立着伟大的纪念碑 —— 两座金字塔和包含羽蛇神庙的 Ciudadela(城堡)。绵延数英里的是规模较小但仍然令人印象深刻的住宅,这些住宅是城市人口的居住地:大约 2000 个多户公寓,由石块砌成,在整齐的正交网格上组织,与城市的仪式中心对齐。这是一个几乎完美的公民繁荣和等级制度的功能形象。我们似乎看到了像莫尔的乌托邦或坎帕内拉的太阳城那样的东西。但有一个问题。住宅和金字塔严格来说并不属于一起,或者至少不是全部。它们的建造占据了不同的时间阶段。神庙也不完全是它看起来的样子。
In fact, in historical terms it is all something of a grand illusion. To understand what’s going on here we have to make some attempt, however tentative, to reconstruct a basic chronological sequence for the city’s development.
事实上,从历史的角度来看,这一切都是一个巨大的幻觉。为了理解这里发生的事情,我们必须做一些尝试,不管是多么的试探性,为城市的发展重建一个基本的时间顺序。
Teotihuacan’s growth to urban dimensions began around the year 0. At that time, whole populations were on the move across the Basin of Mexico and Valley of Puebla, fleeing the effects of seismic activity on their southern frontiers, which included a Plinian eruption of the volcano Popocatépetl. From AD 50 to 150, the flow of people into Teotihuacan siphoned life from surrounding areas. Villages and towns were abandoned, and also whole cities, like Cuicuilco, with its early traditions of pyramid-building. Under several feet of ash lie the ruins of other abandoned settlements. At the Pueblan site of Tetimpa, just eight miles from Popocatépetl, archaeologists have unearthed houses that foreshadow – on a smaller scale – the civic architecture of Teotihuacan.21
特奥蒂瓦坎发展到城市规模大约始于 0 年。当时,整个人口都在向墨西哥盆地和普埃布拉谷迁移,以逃避其南部边境的地震活动的影响,其中包括波波卡特佩特火山的普利尼安喷发。从公元 50 年到 150 年,进入特奥蒂瓦坎的人流抽走了周围地区的生命。村庄和城镇被遗弃,整个城市也被遗弃,如 Cuicuilco,其早期的金字塔建筑传统。在几英尺高的灰烬下,是其他被遗弃的定居点的废墟。在距离波波卡特佩特尔仅 8 英里的特廷帕(Tetimpa)普埃布兰遗址,考古学家发现了预示着特奥蒂瓦坎公民建筑的房屋 —— 规模较小。21
Here the later chronicles do provide some useful, or at least thought-provoking accounts. Folk memories of a mass exodus survived right up to the time of the conquista . One tradition, preserved in the work of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún, tells how Teotihuacan was founded by a coalition of elders, priests and wise men from other settlements. As the city grew it incorporated these smaller traditions, maize gods and village ancestors rubbing shoulders with urban deities of fire and rain.
在这里,后来的编年史确实提供了一些有用的,或者至少是发人深省的描述。民间关于大规模出逃的记忆一直延续到征服时期。方济各会修士 Bernardino de Sahagún 的作品中保存了一个传统,讲述了特奥蒂瓦坎是由来自其他定居点的长老、牧师和智者组成的联盟建立的。随着城市的发展,它吸收了这些小的传统,玉米神和村庄的祖先与城市的火和雨神擦肩而过。
What we can refer to as Teotihuacan’s ‘Old City’ was organized on a parish system, with local shrines serving particular neighbourhoods. The layout of these district temples – three buildings around a central plaza – also follows the plan of earlier structures at Tetimpa, which housed the cults of village ancestors.22 In these early days, from AD 100 to 200, the residential quarters of Teotihuacan may well have looked like an enormous shanty town – but we don’t really know,23 just as we have no clear idea how the fledgling city divided access to arable land and other resources among its citizens. Maize was widely farmed, to be eaten by humans and domestic animals. People kept and ate turkeys, dogs, rabbits and hares. They also grew beans, and enjoyed access to whitetail deer and peccaries, as well as wild fruits and vegetables. Seafood arrived from the distant coast, presumably smoked or salted; but how far the various sectors of the urban economy were integrated at this time, and how exactly resources were pulled in from a wider hinterland, is altogether unclear.24
我们可以把特奥蒂瓦坎的 “老城” 称为教区系统,地方神庙为特定的社区服务。这些区级神庙的布局 —— 围绕中央广场的三座建筑 —— 也遵循了特蒂姆帕早期建筑的规划,这些建筑,用于祭祀村庄的祖先。22在公元 100 至 200 年的早期,特奥蒂瓦坎的住宅区很可能看起来像一个巨大的棚户区 —— 但我们并不真正了解。23就像我们不清楚这个新生的城市是如何在其公民中分配耕地和其他资源的。玉米被广泛耕种,供人类和家畜食用。人们饲养并食用火鸡、狗、兔子和野兔。他们还种植豆子,并享受白尾鹿和山雀,以及野生水果和蔬菜。海鲜从遥远的海岸运来,估计是熏制或腌制的;但此时城市经济的各个部门在多大程度上得到了整合,以及资源究竟是如何从更广阔的腹地拉来的,都完全不清楚。24
What we can say is that the Teotihuacanos’ efforts to create a civic identity focused initially on the building of monuments: the raising of a sacred city in the midst of the wider urban sprawl.25 This meant the creation of an entirely new landscape in the centre of Teotihuacan, requiring the work of some thousands of labourers. Pyramid-mountains and artificial rivers went up, providing a stage for the performance of calendrical rituals. In a colossal feat of civil engineering, the channels of the Rio San Juan and Rio San Lorenzo were diverted, tying them to the city’s orthogonal grid and transforming their marshy banks into solid foundations (all this, recall, without the benefit of working animals or metal tools). This in turn laid the basis for a grand architectural programme which saw the erection of the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The temple faced a sunken plaza that captured the floodwaters of the San Juan to form a seasonal lake, its waters lapping at painted carvings of plumed serpents and shells on the temple façade, making them glisten as rains began to fall in late spring.26
我们可以说,特奥蒂瓦坎人创造公民身份的努力最初集中在纪念碑的建设上:在更广泛的城市扩张中建立起一座神圣的城市。25这意味着在特奥蒂瓦坎的中心创造了一个全新的景观,需要成千上万的劳动者工作。金字塔山和人工河流拔地而起,为举行历法仪式提供了一个舞台。在一项巨大的土木工程壮举中,圣胡安河和圣洛伦索河的河道被改道,将其与城市的正交网格相连,并将其沼泽地变成了坚实的地基(回顾一下,所有这些都是在没有工作的动物或金属工具的情况下进行的)。这反过来又为一个宏伟的建筑计划奠定了基础,其中包括太阳和月亮金字塔以及羽蛇庙的建立。寺庙面对着一个下沉的广场,它将圣胡安河的洪水吸引过来,形成一个季节性的湖泊,湖水拍打着寺庙正面的羽蛇和贝壳的彩绘雕刻,当春末雨季来临的时候,它们就会闪闪发光。26
All that effort of monumental construction required sacrifices, not just of labour and resources but of human life. Each major phase of building is associated with archaeological evidence of ritual killing. Adding together human remains from the two pyramids and the temple, the victims can be counted in the hundreds. Their bodies were placed in pits or trenches arranged symmetrically to define the ground plan of the edifice that would rise over them. At the corners of the Sun Pyramid, offerings of infants were found; under the Moon Pyramid, foreign captives, some decapitated or otherwise mutilated; and in the foundations of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent lay the corpses of male warriors, arms tied back at point of death, buried with the tools and trophies of their former trade. Among the bodies were found obsidian knives and spearheads, trinkets of shell and greenstone and collars made of human teeth and jawbones (some, as it turns out, cunningly faked in shell).27
所有这些纪念性建筑的努力都需要牺牲,不仅是劳动力和资源的牺牲,还有人命的牺牲。每一个主要的建筑阶段都与祭祀杀人的考古证据有关。将两座金字塔和神庙中的人类遗骸加在一起,受害者可达数百人之多。他们的尸体被放置在对称排列的坑或壕沟中,以确定将在其上建造的建筑物的地面平面。在太阳金字塔的四角,发现了婴儿的祭品;在月亮金字塔下,发现了外国,一些被斩首或被肢解的俘虏;在羽蛇神庙的地基中,躺着男性战士的尸体,他们的手臂在死亡时被绑在后面,与他们以前交易的工具和战利品埋在一起。在这些尸体中发现了黑曜石刀和矛头、贝壳和绿宝石饰品以及用人类牙齿和颚骨制成的项圈(事实证明,有些是用贝壳狡猾地伪造的)。27
You would think that at this point – around AD 200 – the fate of Teotihuacan was sealed: its destiny to join the ranks of ‘classic’ Mesoamerican civilizations with their strong traditions of warrior aristocracy and city-states governed by hereditary nobles. What we might then expect to see next, in the archaeological record, is a concentration of power around the city’s focal monuments: the rise of luxurious palaces, inhabited by rulers who were the font of wealth and privilege, with attached quarters for elite kinsmen; and the development of monumental art to glorify their military conquests, the lucrative tribute it generated and their services to the gods. But the evidence tells a very different story, because the citizens of Teotihuacan chose a different path.
你会认为在这一点上 —— 大约在公元 200 年 —— 特奥蒂瓦坎的命运已经注定:它的命运是加入 “经典” 中美洲文明的行列,它们有着强大的战士贵族传统和由世袭贵族统治的城邦。在考古记录中,我们接下来可能会看到权力集中在城市的重点纪念碑周围:豪华宫殿的兴起,统治者居住在这里,他们是财富和特权的源泉,还有附属的精英亲属的住所;纪念碑艺术的发展,颂扬他们的军事征服,它产生的有利可图的贡品和他们对神灵的服务。但证据告诉我们一个非常不同的故事,因为特奥蒂瓦坎的公民选择了一条不同的道路。
In fact, the entire trajectory of Teotihuacan’s political development seems to have gone off on a remarkable tangent. Instead of building palaces and elite quarters, the citizens embarked on a remarkable project of urban renewal, supplying high-quality apartments for nearly all the city’s population, regardless of wealth or status.28 Without written sources, we can’t really say why. Archaeologists are not yet able to distinguish the precise sequence of events with any confidence. But nobody doubts that something did happen, and what we will try to do now is sketch out what it was.
事实上,特奥蒂瓦坎的整个政治发展轨迹似乎已经走上了一条不寻常的道路。市民们没有建造宫殿和精英区,而是开始了一个了不起的城市重建项目,为几乎所有的城市人口提供高质量的公寓,而不考虑财富或地位。28由于没有书面资料,我们无法真正说清原因。考古学家还不能有把握地分辨出事件的确切顺序。但没有人怀疑确实发生了一些事情,而我们现在要做的是勾勒出它是什么。
The big turnaround in Teotihuacan’s fortunes seems to have begun around AD 300. At that time, or shortly after, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent was desecrated and its stores of offerings looted. Not only was it set on fire; many of the gargoyle-like heads of the Feathered Serpent on its façade were smashed or ground to a stump. A large-stepped platform was then constructed to its west, which made what was left of the temple invisible from its main avenue. If you visit the heavily reconstructed ruins of Teotihuacan today and wish to see what remains of its goggle-eyed gods and plumed snakeheads you will have to stand on top of this platform, which archaeologists call the adosada .29
特奥蒂瓦坎命运的大转折似乎始于公元 300 年左右。当时,或之后不久,羽蛇神庙被亵渎,其储存的祭品被洗劫一空。它不仅被放火焚烧,而且其正面的许多像巨龙一样的羽蛇头被砸碎或磨成了树桩。然后在它的西面建造了一个大阶梯平台,这使得从主大道上看不到寺庙的遗迹。如果你今天参观特奥蒂瓦坎大量重建的废墟,并希望看到,它的目镜神和羽蛇头的遗迹,你将不得不站在这个平台之上,考古学家称之为 adosada。29
At this point all new pyramid construction stopped permanently, and there is no further evidence of ritually sanctioned killing at the established Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, which remained in use as civic monuments until around AD 550 – albeit for other, less lethal purposes about which we know little.30 Instead, what we see after AD 300 is an extraordinary flow of urban resources into the provision of excellent stone-built housing, not just for the wealthy or privileged but for the great majority of Teotihuacan’s population. These impressive apartments, laid out in regular plots from one end of the city to the other, were probably not an innovation of this period. Their construction on a city-grid may have begun a century or so earlier, as did the razing of older and more ramshackle dwellings to make way for them.31
在这一点上,所有新的金字塔建设都永久性地停止了,也没有进一步的证据表明在既定的太阳金字塔和月亮金字塔上有仪式上认可的杀戮,这些金字塔作为公民纪念碑一直使用到公元 550 年左右 —— 尽管是为了其他不太致命的目的,我们对此知之甚少。30相反,我们在公元 300 年后看到的是城市资源非凡地流向提供优秀的石砌住房,这不仅是为了富人或特权阶层,也是为了特奥蒂瓦坎的绝大多数人口。这些令人印象深刻的公寓,从城市的一端到另一端有规律地布局,可能不是这个时期的创新。它们在城市网格上的建造可能早在一个世纪前就开始了,就像为了给它们让路而铲除旧的和更破烂的住宅一样。31
Archaeologists at first considered the masonry apartments to be palaces, and it is possible that is exactly how they began around AD 200, when the city seemed set on a course of political centralization. But after AD 300, when the Temple of the Feathered Serpent was desecrated, their construction continued apace, until most of the city’s 100,000 or so residents were effectively living in ‘palatial’, or at least very comfortable, conditions.32 So what were these apartments like, and what kind of homes did people make in them?
考古学家起初认为这些砖石结构的公寓是宫殿,而且有可能这正是它们在公元 200 年左右开始的情况,当时该城市似乎已经走上了政治集中化的道路。但在公元 300 年后,当羽蛇神庙被亵渎时,它们的建造速度继续加快,直到该城市的 10 万左右的居民中的大多数人都有效地生活在 “宫殿” 中,或者至少是非常舒适的条件。32那么,这些公寓是什么样的,人们在其中建造了什么样的房子?
The evidence suggests we should picture small groups of nuclear families, living comfortable lives in single-storey buildings, each equipped with integral drainage facilities and finely plastered floors and walls. Each family seems to have had its own set of rooms within the larger apartment block, complete with private porticoes where light entered the otherwise windowless rooms. We can deduce that the average apartment compound would have housed in total around 100 people, who would have encountered each other routinely in a central courtyard, which also seems to have been the focus of domestic rituals, perhaps jointly observed. Most of these communal spaces were fitted with altars in the standard style of civic construction (known as talud-tablero), and the walls were often brightly painted with murals. Some courtyards had pyramid-shaped shrines, suggesting this architectural form had taken on new and less exclusive roles within the city.33
证据表明,我们应该想象一小群核心家庭,在单层建筑中过着舒适的生活,每栋建筑都配备了完整的排水设施,地板和墙壁都涂有精细的灰泥。每个家庭似乎都有自己的一套房间,在较大的公寓楼里,有私人门廊,光线可以进入没有窗户的房间。我们可以推断出,一般的公寓大院总共会有 100 人左右,他们会在中央的院子里经常相遇,这里似乎也是家庭仪式的焦点,也许是共同遵守的。这些公共空间中的大多数都安装了公民建筑标准风格的祭坛(被称为 talud-tablero),墙壁上往往涂有明亮的壁画。一些院子里有金字塔形的神龛,表明这种建筑形式在城市中已经有了新的、不那么排他的作用。33
René Millon, the archaeologist responsible for producing the first detailed map of Teotihuacan’s layout, felt that the apartment compound was actually invented as a form of social housing, ‘designed for urban life in a city that was becoming increasingly crowded, perhaps approaching the chaotic’.34 Each block was initially laid out to similar scale and dimensions, on plots of roughly 3,600 square metres, although some deviated from this ideal scheme. Strict uniformity was avoided in the arrangement of rooms and courtyards, so in the last resort each compound was unique. Even the more modest apartments show signs of a comfortable lifestyle, with access to imported goods and a staple diet of corn tortillas, eggs, turkey and rabbit meat, and the milk-hued drink known as pulque (an alcoholic beverage fermented from the spiky agave plant).35
负责绘制特奥蒂瓦坎布局的第一张详细地图的考古学家勒内·米隆认为,公寓大院实际上是作为一种社会住房形式而发明的,“是为在一个越来越拥挤,也许接近混乱的城市中的城市生活而设计的”。34每个街区最初都是按照类似的规模和尺寸布置的,地块面积大约为 3600 平方米,尽管有些街区偏离了这个理想方案。在房间和庭院的安排上避免了严格的统一性,所以在最后,每个院落都是独一无二的。即使是比较简陋的公寓也显示出一种舒适的生活方式,可以买到进口商品,主食是玉米饼、鸡蛋、火鸡和兔子肉,以及被称为 pulque(一种由带刺的龙舌兰植物发酵而成的酒精饮料)的牛奶色饮料。35
In other words, few were deprived. More than that, many citizens enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own. Teotihuacan had indeed changed its course away from monarchy and aristocracy to become instead a ‘Tollan of the people’.
换句话说,很少有人被剥夺。不仅如此,许多公民享有的生活水平,在城市历史的任何时期,包括我们自己的历史,都很少有如此广泛的城市社会部门能够达到。特奥蒂瓦坎确实改变了它的路线,不再是君主制和贵族制,而是成为一个 “人民的托兰”。
But how was this remarkable transformation achieved? Apart from spoilage of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, there are few signs of violence. Land and resources appear to have been allocated to family groups who became neighbours. In this multi-ethnic city, each co-residential group of between sixty and 100 people would have enjoyed two kinds of communal life. One was based on kinship, with family ties extending far beyond the apartment block and often beyond the city – ties which could have troublesome implications, as we’ll shortly see. The other was based more strictly on co-residence in apartments and neighbourhoods, often reinforced by shared craft specializations such as garment-making or obsidian-working.
但这种显著的转变是如何实现的呢?除了羽蛇神庙被破坏之外,几乎没有暴力的迹象。土地和资源似乎被分配给了成为邻居的家庭团体。在这个多民族的城市里,每个由 60 到 100 人组成的共同居住小组会享受两种社区生活。一种是以亲属关系为基础的,家庭关系远远超出了公寓区,而且往往超出了城市 —— 正如我们很快会看到的,这种关系可能会产生麻烦。另一种是基于更严格的公寓和街区的共同居住,通常通过共同的手工艺专业,如制衣或黑曜石工作来加强。
Both forms of urban community, existing alongside one another, retained a human scale, a world away from our modern conception of the ‘housing estate’ in which nuclear families are sequestered by the thousands in multi-storey monoliths. So we are back to the question with which we started: what held this ‘New Teotihuacan’ together, if not a hereditary elite or some other type of governing class?
这两种形式的城市社区,彼此并存,都保留了人的尺度,与我们现代概念中的 “住宅区” 有天壤之别,在那里,核心家庭被隔离在数千座多层的巨石中。因此,我们又回到了我们开始时的问题 :如果不是世袭精英或其他类型的管理阶层,是什么将这个 “新特奥蒂瓦坎” 凝聚在一起?
Without written evidence it may never be possible to reconstruct the details, but by now we can probably rule out any sort of top-down system in which elite cadres of royal administrators or priests drew up plans and sent out orders. A more likely possibility is that authority was distributed among local assemblies, perhaps answerable to a governing council. If any trace of these community associations survives it is in the district shrines known as ‘three-temple complexes’. At least twenty such complexes were dispersed throughout the city, serving a total of 2,000 apartments, one for every 100 apartment blocks.36
在没有书面证据的情况下,可能永远不可能重建细节,但现在我们大概可以排除任何一种自上而下的系统,即由皇家行政人员或祭司组成的精英队伍制定计划并发出命令。更有可能的是,权力被分配给地方议会,也许要向管理委员会负责。如果说这些社区协会的痕迹还在,那就是被称为 “三庙群” 的地区神庙。至少有 20 个这样的建筑群分散在整个城市,总共为 2000 个公寓提供服务,每 100 个公寓楼就有一个。36
This might imply the delegation of government to neighbourhood councils with constituencies similar in size to those of Mesopotamian city-wards, or the assembly houses of Ukrainian mega-sites we discussed in Chapter Eight, or for that matter the barrios of later Mesoamerican towns. It may seem hard to imagine a city this size running successfully in this way for centuries without strong leaders or an extensive bureaucracy; but as we’ll see, first-hand accounts of later cities from the time of the Spanish conquest lend credence to the idea.
这可能意味着将政府授权给选区规模类似于美索不达米亚城市区的邻里委员会,或我们在第八章讨论的乌克兰大型城市的议会大厦,或后来中美洲城镇的贫民区。似乎很难想象这么大的城市在没有强有力的领导人或广泛的官僚机构的情况下以这种方式成功运行了几个世纪;但正如我们将看到的那样,从西班牙征服时期开始的后期城市的第一手资料为这种想法提供了可信度。
Another, more ebullient face of Teotihuacan’s civic identity is revealed in its mural art. Despite efforts to see them as sombre religious iconography, these playful pictorial scenes – painted on the interior walls of apartment compounds from around AD 350 – often seem veritably psychedelic.37 Streaming effigies emerge from clustered plant, human and animal bodies, framed by figures with elaborate costumes, sometimes grasping hallucinogenic seeds and mushrooms; and among the crowd scenes we find flower eaters with rainbows bursting from their heads.38 Such scenes often depict human figures all at roughly the same size, with no individual raised up over another.39
特奥蒂瓦坎公民身份的另一个更活泼的面貌在其壁画艺术中显现出来。尽管人们努力把它们看作是阴郁的宗教图腾,但这些俏皮的图画场景 —— 从公元 350 年左右开始画在公寓大院的内墙上 —— 往往显得非常迷幻。37流动的雕像从成群的植物、人类和动物身体中出现,被穿着精致服装的人物框住,有时抓着致幻的种子和蘑菇;在人群场景中,我们发现吃花的人头上冒出了彩虹。38这样的场景通常描绘的人像大小基本相同,没有一个人比另一个人更高大。39
Of course, these murals represent Teotihuacanos as they liked to imagine themselves; social realities are always more complex. Archaeological excavations in a part of the city known as Teopancazco, lying south of the city centre, show just how complex those realities could actually get. Traces of domestic life in Teopancazco dating to around AD 350 reveal the affluent life of its inhabitants, whose shell-ornamented cotton dress suggests they originally came from the Gulf Coast and continued to trade with that region. From there they also brought with them certain customs, including unusually violent rituals, which are not so far documented elsewhere in the city. These seem to have involved the capture and decapitation of foreign enemies, whose heads were kept and buried in offering vessels, found within their private homes.40
当然,这些壁画代表了特奥蒂瓦卡诺人喜欢想象的自己;社会现实总是更加复杂。在城市中心南部被称为 Teopancazco 的地方进行的考古发掘表明,这些现实情况实际上是多么的复杂。Teopancazco 的家庭生活痕迹可追溯到公元 350 年左右,揭示了其居民的富裕生活,其带贝壳装饰的棉布衣服表明他们最初来自海湾,并继续与该地区进行贸易。他们还从那里带来了一些习俗,包括异常暴力的仪式,这在该城市的其他地方还没有记载。这些仪式似乎涉及对外国敌人的抓捕和斩首,这些敌人的头颅被保存并埋葬在他们私人住宅中的祭器中。40
Now here we have something going on that would obviously be very difficult to square with the idea of communal living on a large scale; and this is precisely our point. Below the surface of civil society at Teotihuacan there must have been all sorts of social tensions simmering away among groups of radically different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds who were constantly moving in and out, consolidating relationships with foreign trading partners, cultivating alter egos in remote places and sometimes bringing those forms of identity back with them. (We might allow ourselves to imagine what would happen should a Teotihuacano freebooter who’d managed to make himself King of Tikal ever have returned home.) By around AD 550, the social fabric of the city had begun to come apart at the seams. There is no compelling evidence of foreign invasion. Things seems to have disintegrated from within. Almost as suddenly as it had once coalesced some five centuries previously, the city’s population dispersed again, leaving their Tollan behind them.41
现在,我们有一些事情正在发生,显然很难与大规模的社区生活的想法相吻合;而这正是我们的观点。在特奥蒂瓦坎公民社会的表面之下,肯定存在着各种社会紧张关系,这些群体有着截然不同的种族和语言背景,他们不断地进进出出,巩固与外国贸易伙伴的关系,在偏远地区培养另一个自我,有时还把这些形式的身份带回来。(我们可以想象一下,如果一个设法使自己成为蒂卡尔国王的特奥蒂瓦卡诺自由盗贼回到家乡,会发生什么。)到公元 550 年左右,该城市的社会结构已经开始分崩离析。没有令人信服的外国入侵的证据。事情似乎已经从内部瓦解了。几乎就像大约五个世纪前曾经凝聚在一起一样突然,城市的人口再次分散,把他们的托兰人留在身后。41
The rise and decline of Teotihuacan set in motion a roughly cyclical pattern of demographic concentration and dispersal in central Mexico which repeated itself a number of times between AD 300 and 1200, down to the disintegration of Tula and the fall of the Toltec state.42 Over this longer span of time, what was the legacy of Teotihuacan and its grand urban experiment? Should we view the whole episode as a passing deviation, a blip (albeit an extremely large blip) on the road that led from Olmec hierarchy to Toltec aristocracy and eventually Aztec imperialism? Or might the egalitarian aspects of Teotihuacan have a distinct legacy of their own? Few have really considered the latter possibility, but there are good reasons to ask, especially since early Spanish accounts of the Mexican highlands provide some extraordinarily suggestive material – including descriptions of indigenous cities which, to European eyes, could only be understood as republics, or even democracies.
特奥蒂瓦坎的兴衰在墨西哥中部掀起了人口集中和分散的大致周期性模式,这种模式在公元 300 年至 1200 年间多次重复,直至图拉的解体和托尔特克国家的衰落。42在这个较长的时间跨度内,特奥蒂瓦坎及其宏伟的城市实验的遗产是什么?我们是否应该把整个事件看作是一个短暂的偏差,即从奥尔梅克的等级制度到托尔特克的贵族制度以及最终的阿兹特克帝国主义道路上的一个小插曲(尽管是一个极其巨大的插曲)?或者特奥蒂瓦坎的平等主义方面可能有其自身的独特遗产?很少有人真正考虑过后一种可能性,但有很好的理由去问,特别是由于早期西班牙人对墨西哥高地的描述提供了一些非常有暗示性的材料 —— 包括对土著城市的描述,在欧洲人看来,这些城市只能理解为共和国,甚至是民主国家。
With this in mind, let’s now consider a very different case of cultural contact, which takes us forwards in time to the beginnings of European expansion in the Americas. It concerns an indigenous city-state by the name of Tlaxcala, adjacent to what’s now the Mexican state of Puebla, which played a pivotal role in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire or Triple Alliance. Here is how Charles C. Mann, in his acclaimed 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005), describes what happened in 1519 when Hernán Cortés passed through:
考虑到这一点,现在让我们考虑一个非常不同的文化接触案例,它把我们带到了欧洲在美洲扩张的初期。它涉及一个名为特拉斯卡拉的土著城邦,毗邻现在的墨西哥普埃布拉州,它在西班牙征服阿兹特克帝国或三国联盟时发挥了关键作用。以下是查尔斯·C·曼在其备受赞誉的《1491:哥伦布之前的美洲新启示》(2005 年)中对 1519 年埃尔南·科尔特斯经过时的描述。
Marching inland from the sea, the Spanish at first fought repeatedly with Tlaxcala, a confederation of four small kingdoms that had maintained its independence despite repeated Alliance incursions. Thanks to their guns, horses, and steel blades, the foreigners won every battle, even with Tlaxcala’s huge numerical advantage. But Cortés’s forces shrank with every fight. He was on the verge of losing everything when the four Tlaxcala kings abruptly reversed course. Concluding from the results of their battles that they could wipe out the Europeans, though at great cost, the Indian leaders offered what seemed a win-win deal: they would stop attacking Cortés, sparing his life, the lives of the surviving Spaniards, and those of many Indians, if he in return would join with Tlaxcala in a united assault on the hated Triple Alliance.43
西班牙人从海上向内陆进军,起初与特拉斯卡拉反复交战,特拉斯卡拉是由四个小王国组成的联盟,尽管联盟多次入侵,但仍保持了独立。由于他们的枪、马和钢刀,外国人赢得了每一场战斗,即使特拉斯卡拉在人数上有巨大的优势。但科尔特斯的部队却在每一次战斗中缩水。当特拉斯卡拉的四位国王突然改变方向时,他正处于失去一切的边缘。从他们的战斗结果中得出结论,他们可以消灭欧洲人,尽管要付出巨大的代价,印第安领导人提出了一个似乎是双赢的交易:他们将停止攻击科尔特斯,饶恕他的生命,幸存的西班牙人的生命,以及许多印第安人的生命,如果他与特拉斯卡拉联合起来,对可恨的三国联盟进行联合攻击,作为回报。43
Now there is a basic problem with this account. There were no kings in Tlaxcala. Therefore, it could not in any sense be described as a confederation of kingdoms. So how did Mann come to think there were? As an award-winning science journalist, but not a specialist in the history of sixteenth-century Mesoamerica, he was at the mercy of secondary sources; and this, it turns out, is where much of the problem begins.
现在,这种说法有一个基本问题。特拉斯卡拉没有国王。因此,它在任何意义上都不能被描述为一个的王国联合体。那么,曼恩是如何认为有国王的呢?作为一名获奖的科学记者,但不是 16 世纪中美洲历史方面的专家,他受制于二手资料;事实证明,这正是问题的起点。
No doubt Mann must have assumed (as would any reasonable person) that if Tlaxcala were anything other than a kingdom – say a republic or a democracy, or even some form of oligarchy – then the secondary literature would have been full of lively debates about what this implies, not just for our understanding of the Spanish conquest as a key turning point in modern world history, but for the development of indigenous societies in Mesoamerica, or indeed for political theory in general. Oddly, he’d have been wrong to assume this.44 Finding ourselves in a similar position, we decided to delve a little deeper. What we found, we must admit, was rather startling, even to us. Let’s begin by comparing Mann’s account to the one Cortés himself addressed to his king, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
毫无疑问,曼恩一定认为(正如任何有理智的人一样),如果特拉斯卡拉不是一个王国 —— 比如共和制或民主制,甚至是某种形式的寡头政治 —— 那么二手文献中就会充满关于这意味着什么的热烈争论,不仅对我们理解西班牙的征服是世界现代史的一个关键转折点,而且对中美洲本土社会的发展,甚至对一般的政治理论都是如此。奇怪的是,他的这种假设是错误的。44发现自己处于类似的位置,我们决定深入研究一下。我们必须承认,我们的发现是相当惊人的,甚至对我们来说。首先,让我们把曼恩的叙述与科尔特斯本人写给他的国王 —— 神圣罗马帝国皇帝查理五世的叙述进行比较。
In his Five Letters of Relation, written between 1519 and 1526, Hernán Cortés recounts his entry to the mountain-ringed Valley of Puebla, on the southern tip of the Mexican altiplano . The valley at that time sheltered numerous native cities, of which the largest included pyramid-studded Cholula, and also the city of Tlaxcala. It was indeed in Tlaxcala that Cortés found local allies who fought alongside him, advancing first on Cholula and then going on to defeat the armies of Moctezuma the Younger and lay waste to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, in the neighbouring Valley of Mexico. Cortés estimated the population of Tlaxcala and its rural dependencies at 150,000. ‘There is a market in this city,’ he reported back to Charles V, ‘in which more than thirty thousand people are occupied in buying and selling,’ and the province ‘contains many wide-spreading fertile valleys all tilled and sown, no part of it being left wild, and measures some ninety leagues in circumference’. Also, the ‘order of government so far observed among the people resembles very much the republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa for there is no supreme overlord.’45
赫尔南·科尔特斯在 1519 年至 1526 年间撰写的《五封关系信》中,叙述了他进入墨西哥高原南端的环山普埃布拉谷的情况。当时的山谷里有许多本地城市,其中最大的城市包括金字塔林立的乔鲁拉,还有特拉斯卡拉市。实际上,正是在特拉斯卡拉,科尔特斯找到了与他并肩作战的当地盟友,首先向乔鲁拉推进,然后继续击败小莫克特苏马的军队,并将邻近的墨西哥山谷中的阿兹特克人首都特诺奇蒂特兰夷为平地。科尔特斯估计特拉斯卡拉及其农村附属地的人口为 15 万人。他向查理五世报告说,“这个城市有一个市场,有三万多人在那里从事买卖活动”,而且该省 “有许多宽阔的肥沃山谷,都被耕种和播种,没有一部分是野生的,周长约为 90 里格”。此外,“迄今为止在人民中观察到的政府秩序非常类似于威尼斯、热那亚和比萨的共和国,因为那里没有最高的霸主。45
Cortés was a minor aristocrat from a part of Spain where even municipal councils were still something of a novelty; one might argue he had little real knowledge of republics and therefore would hardly be the most reliable judge of such matters. Perhaps so; but by 1519 he had considerable experience in identifying Mesoamerican kings and either recruiting or neutralizing them, since this is largely what he had been doing since his arrival on the mainland. In Tlaxcala, he couldn’t find any. Instead, after an initial clash with Tlaxcalteca warriors, he found himself engaged with representatives of a popular urban council whose every decision had to be collectively ratified. Here is where things become decidedly strange, in terms of how the history of these events has come down to us.
科尔特斯是一个来自西班牙某地的小贵族,在那里,即使是市议会也是一种新鲜事物;人们可能会说,他对共和国没有什么真正的了解,因此很难,成为此类事务的最可靠的判断者。也许是这样;但到了 1519 年,他在识别中美洲的国王并招募他们或使其中立方面有了相当的经验,因为这基本上是他到达大陆后一直在做的事情。在特拉斯卡拉,他没能找到任何一个。相反,在与特拉斯卡拉战士发生初步冲突后,他发现自己与一个民众城市委员会的代表打交道,该委员会的每项决定都必须得到集体的批准。就这些事件的历史如何流传到我们这里而言,事情在这里变得十分奇怪。
It is worth emphasizing again that we are dealing here with what is, by most estimations, one of the pivotal episodes of modern world history: the events leading directly up to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, and a blueprint for subsequent European conquests throughout the Americas. We assume that nobody – even the most ardent believer in the forces of technological progress, or ‘guns, germs, and steel’ – would go so far as to claim that fewer than 1,000 Spaniards could ever have conquered Tenochtitlan (a highly organized city, covering over five square miles, containing roughly a quarter of a million people) without the help of these indigenous allies, who included some 20,000 warriors from Tlaxcala. In which case, to understand what was really going on it becomes crucial to understand why the Tlaxcalteca decided to joined forces with Cortés, and how – with a population of tens of thousands, and no supreme overlord to govern them – they arrived at a decision to do so.
值得再次强调的是,我们在这里处理的是,根据大多数估计,现代世界历史的关键事件之一:直接导致西班牙征服阿兹特克帝国的事件,以及随后欧洲人在整个美洲的征服蓝图。我们假定,没有人 —— 即使是最热衷于技术进步的力量或 “枪炮、病菌和钢铁” 的信徒 —— 会声称,如果没有这些土著盟友的帮助,包括来自特拉斯卡拉的约 2 万名战士,不到 1000 名西班牙人就能征服特诺奇蒂特兰(一个高度组织化的城市,面积超过 5 平方英里,大约有 25 万人口)。在这种情况下,要了解真正发生了什么,关键是要了解为什么特拉斯卡拉人决定与科尔特斯联手,以及他们如何 —— 拥有数万人口,又没有最高统治者来管理他们 —— 做出这样的决定。
On the first matter, our sources are clear. The Tlaxcalteca were out to settle old scores. From their perspective, an alliance with Cortés might bring to a favourable end their struggles against the Aztec Triple Alliance, and the so-called ‘Flowery Wars’ between the Valleys of Puebla and Mexico.46 As usual, most of our sources reflect the perspective of Aztec elites, who liked to portray Tlaxcala’s long-standing resistance to their imperial yoke as something between a game and imperial largesse (they allowed the Tlaxcalteca to remain independent, the Aztecs later insisted to their Spanish conquerors, because, after all, the empire’s soldiers needed somewhere to train; their priests needed a stockyard of human victims for sacrifice to the gods, and so forth). But this was braggadocio. In fact, Tlaxcala and its Otomí guerrilla units had been holding the Aztecs successfully at bay for generations. Their resistance was not just military. Tlaxcalteca cultivated a civic ethos that worked against the emergence of ambitious leaders, and hence potential quislings – a counter-example to Aztec principles of governance.
关于第一个问题,我们的消息来源很清楚。特拉斯卡尔特卡人要算旧账。从他们的角度来看,与科尔特斯结盟可能会使他们与阿兹特克三国联盟的斗争,以及普埃布拉山谷和墨西哥之间的所谓 “花花绿绿的战争” 得到有利的结束。46像往常一样,我们的大多数资料都反映了阿兹特克精英的观点,他们喜欢把特拉斯卡拉对其帝国枷锁的长期抵抗描绘成介于游戏和帝国慷慨之间的东西(他们允许特拉斯卡尔特卡保持独立,阿兹特克人后来向他们的西班牙征服者坚称,因为毕竟,帝国的士兵需要有地方训练;他们的牧师需要一个用于向神明献祭的人类受害者储备场,等等)。但这是夸夸其谈。事实上,特拉斯卡拉和它的奥托米游击队已经成功地阻挡了阿兹特克人几代人。他们的抵抗不仅仅是军事上的。特拉斯卡拉培养了一种公民精神,这种精神反对出现野心勃勃的领导人,因此也反对潜在的游击队 —— 这是阿兹特克人治理原则的一个反例。
Here we come to the crux of the problem.
在这里,我们来到了问题的关键所在。
Politically, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and the city-state of Tlaxcala embodied opposite ideals (no less than, say, ancient Sparta and Athens). Still, little of this history is known, because the story we’ve become used to telling about the conquest of the Americas is an entirely different one. The fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521 is often used to illustrate what some feel to be deeper, underlying currents of change in human societies: the forces that give history its overall shape and direction. Starting with Alfred Crosby and Jared Diamond,47 writers in this vein have repeatedly pointed out that the conquistadors had something akin to manifest destiny on their side. Not the divinely ordained sort of destiny they envisaged for themselves, but rather the unstoppable force of an invisible army of Neolithic Old World microbes, marching alongside the Spaniards, carrying waves of smallpox to decimate indigenous populations, and a Bronze Age legacy of metal weapons, guns and horses to shock and awe the helpless natives.
在政治上,阿兹特克人的首都特诺奇蒂特兰和特拉斯卡拉城邦体现了相反的理想(不亚于古代斯巴达和雅典)。但是,这段历史仍然鲜为人知,因为我们已经习惯于讲述关于征服美洲的故事,这是一个完全不同的故事。1521 年特诺奇蒂特兰的陷落经常被用来说明一些人认为是人类社会中更深层次的、潜在的变革潮流:赋予历史以整体形态和方向的力量。从阿尔弗雷德·克罗斯比和贾里德·戴蒙德开始。47这方面的作家们一再指出,征服者们有类似于命运的东西在他们身边。不是他们为自己设想的那种神圣的命运,而是一支由新石器时代的旧世界微生物组成的无形军队的不可阻挡的力量,他们与西班牙人并肩作战,带着一波又一波的天花来消灭土著人口,还有青铜时代遗留下来的金属武器、枪和马来震慑无助的土著人。
We like to tell ourselves that Europeans introduced the Americas not just to these agents of destruction but also to modern industrial democracy, ingredients for which were nowhere to be found there, not even in embryo. All this supposedly came as a single cultural package: advanced metallurgy, animal-powered vehicles, alphabetic writing systems and a certain penchant for freethinking that is seen as necessary for technological progress. ‘Natives’, in contrast, are assumed to have existed in some sort of alternative, quasi-mystical universe. They could not, by definition, be arguing about political constitutions or engaging in processes of sober deliberation over decisions that changed the course of world history; and if European observers report them doing so, they must either be mistaken, or were simply projecting on to ‘Indians’ their own ideas about democratic governance, even when those ideas were hardly practised in Europe itself.
我们喜欢告诉自己,欧洲人不仅把这些破坏因素引入了美洲,还把现代工业民主引入了美洲,而现代工业民主的成分在那里根本找不到,甚至连雏形都没有。所有这些据说都是作为一个单一的文化包来的:先进的冶金学、动物动力的交通工具、字母书写系统和某种自由思考的爱好,这被视为技术进步的必要条件。相比之下,“原住民” 被认为是存在于某种替代的、准神秘的宇宙中。根据定义,他们不可能争论政治宪法或参与改变世界历史进程的决策的冷静审议过程;如果欧洲观察员报告他们这样做,他们一定是搞错了,或者只是把他们自己关于民主治理的想法投射到 “印第安人” 身上,即使这些想法在欧洲本身几乎没有得到实践。
As we’ve also seen, this way of reading history would have been quite alien to Enlightenment philosophers, who were more inclined to think their ideals of freedom and equality owed much to the peoples of the New World and were by no means certain if those ideals were at all compatible with industrial advance. We are dealing, again, with powerful modern myths. Such myths don’t merely inform what people say: to an even greater extent, they ensure certain things go unnoticed. Some of the key early sources on Tlaxcala have never even appeared in translation, and new data emerging in recent years has not really been noticed outside specialist circles. Let’s see if we can’t set the record straight.
正如我们所看到的,这种解读历史的方式对启蒙哲学家来说是相当陌生的,他们更倾向于,认为他们的自由和平等的理想在很大程度上要归功于新世界的人民,而且绝不能确定这些理想是否与工业进步兼容。我们正在处理的,又是强大的现代神话。这种神话不仅仅是为人们的言论提供信息:在更大程度上,它们确保某些事情不被注意。一些关于特拉斯卡拉的关键早期资料甚至从未出现在翻译中,而近年来出现的新数据也没有真正被专家圈外人注意到。让我们来看看我们是否能把记录搞清楚。
How, exactly, did the Tlaxcalteca arrive at a decision to ally with Cortés on the field of battle, thereby ensuring the Spaniards’ victory over the Aztec Empire? It is clear the matter was fraught and deeply divisive (as it was in other Pueblan cities as well: in Cholula, for example, the same dilemma occasioned a rupture between the leaders of six calpolli – urban wards – three of whom took the others hostage, whereupon the latter absconded to Tlaxcala).48 In Tlaxcala itself, though, the argument took a very different form to what happened in Cholula.
特拉斯卡尔特卡人究竟是如何决定在战场上与科尔特斯结盟,从而确保西班牙人战胜阿兹特克帝国的?很明显,这件事充满了矛盾和分歧(在普埃布兰的其他城市也是如此:例如,在乔鲁拉,同样的困境导致了六个calpolli —— 城市区的领导人之间的决裂,其中三个人把其他人当作人质,而后者则潜逃到了特拉斯卡拉)。48不过,在特拉斯卡拉本身,争论的形式与乔鲁拉发生的情况非常不同。
Some of the evidence is to be found in Bernal Díaz’s famous Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1568), which contains lengthy passages on the Spaniards’ interactions with warriors and emissaries from Tlaxcala. Another much-used source is the illustrated codex known as Historia de Tlaxcala (1585), by the mestizo historian Diego Muñoz Camargo; and there are also important writings by the Francisan friar Toribio of Benavente. But the most detailed source – in our minds the key one – is a book that is hardly ever cited; in fact, it is hardly ever read, at least by historians (though specialists in Renaissance humanism sometimes comment on its literary style). We are referring to the unfinished Crónica de la Nueva España, composed between 1558 and 1563 by Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, one of the first rectors of the University of Mexico.49
一些证据可以在贝纳尔·迪亚斯著名的《新西班牙征服史》(Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España,1568 年)中找到,其中有很长的篇幅介绍了西班牙人与来自特拉斯卡拉的武士和使者的互动。另一个经常使用的资料是被称为《特拉斯卡拉历史》(Historia de Tlaxcala)的手抄本,作者是混血儿历史学家迭戈·穆尼奥斯·卡马戈(Diego Muñoz Camargo);还有弗朗西斯修士 Toribio of Benavente 的重要著作。但最详细的资料 —— 在我们看来是最关键的资料 —— 是一本几乎没有人引用的书;事实上,它几乎没有人读过,至少没有历史学家读过(尽管文艺复兴时期人文主义的专家有时会对其文学风格进行评论)。我们指的是未完成的《新西班牙记》(Crónica de la Nueva España),由墨西哥大学的首批校长之一弗朗西斯科·塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔在 1558 至 1563 年间创作。49
Cervantes de Salazar was born around 1515 in the Spanish city of Toledo and studied at the prestigious University of Salamanca, where his scholarly reputation was second to none. After a time in Flanders he became Latin secretary to the Archbishop of Seville; this gained him entry to the court of Charles V, where he heard Hernán Cortés relating his experiences of the New World. This young and gifted scholar soon became a devotee of the conquistador, and within a few years of Cortés’s death in 1547 Cervantes de Salazar set sail for Mexico. On arrival, he taught Latin on premises owned by Cortés’s son and heir, but soon became a central figure in the newly established university while also taking holy orders; he would attempt to juggle ecclesiastical and scholarly duties for the remainder of his life, with mixed success.
塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔大约于 1515 年出生在西班牙的托莱多市,在著名的萨拉曼卡大学学习,在那里他的学术声誉是首屈一指的。在佛兰德斯呆了一段时间后,他成为塞维利亚大主教的拉丁文秘书;这使他进入了查理五世的宫廷,在那里他听到了埃尔南·科尔特斯讲述他在新世界的经历。这位年轻而有天赋的学者很快就成了这位征服者的信徒,在科尔特斯 1547 年去世后的几年内,塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔启程前往墨西哥。到达墨西哥后,他在科尔特斯的儿子和继承人拥有的房舍中教授拉丁文,但很快就成为新成立的大学的核心人物,同时还接受了圣职;他在余生中试图兼顾教会和学术职责,但成效不一。
In 1558 the Municipality of Mexico, composed mainly of first-generation conquistadors or their descendants, was sufficiently impressed with Cervantes de Salazar’s scholarly abilities to grant him his greatest wish: an annual stipend of 200 gold pesos to support his composition of a general history of New Spain, focusing on the themes of discovery and conquest. This was quite the endorsement and, two years later, Cervantes de Salazar (already some way into his manuscript) won a further grant, which was specifically intended to support a period of fieldwork. He must have visited Tlaxcala and its environs during that time in order to obtain valuable historical evidence directly from local caciques who lived through the conquista, and from their immediate descendants.50
1558 年,主要由第一代征服者或其后代组成的墨西哥市政府对塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔的学术能力留下了深刻印象,满足了他最大的愿望:每年提供 200 金比索的津贴,以支持他撰写新西班牙的通史,重点是发现和征服的主题。这是对他的认可,两年后,塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔(已经对他的手稿有了一定的了解)又获得了一笔资助,这笔资助是专门用来支持一段时期的实地考察的。在那段时间里,他肯定访问了特拉斯卡拉及其周边地区,以便直接从经历过征服的当地卡西克人以及他们的直系后代那里获得宝贵的历史证据。50
The municipality appears to have kept its appointed chronicler on a tight leash, demanding three-monthly updates on his manuscript. His last submission came in 1563, by which time, despite his best efforts, he was embroiled in a bitter ecclesiastical dispute that put him on the wrong side of the General Inquisitor, the powerful Pedro Moya de Contreras. In those acrimonious years, Cervantes de Salazar saw Martín Cortés and many of his other close associates variously imprisoned, tortured or exiled as rebels against the Spanish Crown. Cervantes de Salazar made sufficient compromises to escape such a fate; but his reputation suffered, and to this day he is often regarded as a minor academic source by comparison, say, with Bernardino de Sahagún. Ultimately, both scholars’ work would meet a similar fate, delivered to the imperial councils of the Indies and the Inquisition in Spain for obligatory censorship of matters relating to ‘idolatrous practices’ (though not, it seems, on matters of indigenous politics), without allowing any original or copy to remain in circulation.51
市政府似乎对其指定的编年史家管得很严,要求他每三个月更新一次手稿。他最后一次提交稿件是在 1563 年,那时,尽管他尽了最大努力,但还是卷入了一场激烈的教会纠纷,使他站在了总裁判长、有权有势的佩德罗·莫亚·德·孔特雷拉斯的对立面。在那段激烈的岁月里,塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔看到马丁·科尔特斯和他的许多其他亲信作为反对西班牙王室的叛徒被不同程度地监禁、拷打或流放。塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔做出了足够的妥协,从而逃脱了这样的命运;但他的声誉受到了影响,时至今日,他经常被视为一个次要的学术来源,比如与伯纳德·德·萨哈贡相比。最终,这两位学者的作品都遭遇了类似的命运,被送到印度帝国议会和西班牙的宗教裁判所,对与 “偶像崇拜行为” 有关的事项进行强制审查(尽管似乎没有对本土政治事项进行审查),不允许任何原件或副本继续流通。51
The result was that, for a period of centuries, Cervantes de Salazar’s Crónica was effectively hiding in plain sight.52 It is largely to the remarkable efforts of Zelia Maria Magdalena Nuttall (1857–1933) – pioneering archaeologist, anthropologist and finder of lost codices – that we owe not just the rediscovery of Cervantes de Salazar’s unfinished Crónica de la Nueva España, which she identified in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid in 1911, but also most of the surviving details of his life and the circumstances of its composition, which she extracted from the archives of the town council in the city of Mexico, finding (to her astonishment) that less careful historians who went before her had discovered nothing worthy of note there. It was only in 1914 that the Crónica saw publication. To this day there is still no critical introduction or commentary to guide readers through its sixteenth-century prose, or point them towards its significance as a record of political affairs in an indigenous Mesoamerican city.53
其结果是,在几个世纪的时间里,塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔的《新西班牙记》实际上隐藏在众目睽睽之下。52 这主要归功于泽利亚·马格达莱纳·纳托尔(1857-1933)的杰出努力,她是一位先驱性的考古学家、人类学家和失落手抄本的发现者,我们不仅重新发现了塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔未完成的《新西班牙记》,她于 1911 年在马德里的国家图书馆发现了这本书。此外,她还从墨西哥市议会的档案中提取了大部分关于他的生活和创作情况的遗存细节,发现(令她吃惊的是)在她之前的那些不太仔细的历史学家在那里没有发现值得注意的东西。直到 1914 年,《新西班牙记》才得以出版。时至今日,仍然没有批评性的介绍或评论来指导读者阅读其 16 世纪的散文,或指出其作为中美洲土著城市政治事务记录的重要性。53
Critics have emphasized that Cervantes de Salazar was writing a few decades after the facts he described, basing his chronicle on earlier accounts – but this is equally true of other key sources regarding the Spanish conquest. They also note he wasn’t a particularly competent ethnographer in the mould of, say, Sahagún, being more steeped in the works of Horace and Livy than the indigenous traditions of Mexico. All this may be true, just as it is true that the literary tradition prevailing at the time tended to invoke Greek and especially Roman examples at the drop of a hat. Still, the Crónica is clearly not some kind of projection of Salazar’s classical training. It contains rich descriptions of indigenous figures and institutions from the time of the Spanish invasion which bear no resemblance to any classical sources and which in many cases are corroborated by first-hand accounts. What are not, apparently, in those other accounts are the details that Cervantes de Salazar provides.
批评者强调,塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔是在他所描述的事实发生几十年后才开始写作的,他的编年史是以早期的描述为基础的 —— 但关于西班牙征服的其他关键资料也是如此。他们还注意到,他并不是一个特别称职的民族学家,比如说萨哈古恩,他更多地是沉浸在贺拉斯和李维的作品中,而不是墨西哥的本土传统。所有这些可能都是事实,正如当时盛行的文学传统倾向于动辄引用希腊特别是罗马的例子一样。不过,《新西班牙记》显然不是萨拉扎尔的古典训练的某种投射。它包含了对西班牙入侵时期本土人物和机构的丰富描述,这些描述与任何古典资料都没有相似之处,而且在许多情况下都得到了第一手资料的证实。显然,那些其他的描述中没有塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔提供的细节。
Of special interest to us are those extended sections of the Crónica that deal directly with the governing council of Tlaxcala, and its deliberations over whether to ally with the Spanish invaders. They include lengthy accounts of speeches and diplomatic gifts going back and forth between representatives of the Spaniards and their Tlaxcalteca counterparts, whose oratory in council occasioned much admiration. According to Cervantes de Salazar, those who spoke for Tlaxcala included elder statesmen – such as Xicotencatl the Elder, father to the military general also named Xicotencatl who is still lionized in the state of Tlaxcala to this day54 – but also masters of commerce, religious experts and the top legal authorities of the time. What Salazar describes in these remarkable passages is evidently not the workings of a royal court but of a mature urban parliament, which sought consensus for its decisions through reasoned argument and lengthy deliberations – carrying on, when necessary, for weeks at a time.
我们特别感兴趣的是《新西班牙记》中那些直接涉及到特拉斯卡拉管理委员会及其对是否与西班牙侵略者结盟的审议的长篇部分。这些内容包括西班牙人的代表和特拉斯卡拉人的代表之间来回的演讲和外交礼物的长篇报道,他们在议会中的演说引起了人们的钦佩。根据塞万提斯·德·萨拉萨尔(Cervantes de Salazar)的说法,为特拉斯卡拉说话的人包括年长的政治家 —— 例如西科腾卡特长老,他是同样名为西科腾卡特的军事将领的父亲,至今在特拉斯卡拉州的,他仍然受到人们的敬仰。54此外,还有商业大师、宗教专家和当时的最高法律权威。萨拉萨尔在这些引人注目的段落中所描述的显然不是一个皇家法庭的工作,而是一个成熟的城市议会的工作,它通过合理的争论和长时间的审议来寻求对其决定的共识 —— 必要时,一次要进行数周的审议。
The key passages are in Book Three. Cortés is still encamped outside the city with his newfound Totonac allies. Ambassadors move back and forth between the Spaniards and the Ayuntamiento (city council) of Tlaxcala, where deliberations commence. After many welcomes and much kissing of hands, a lord named Maxixcatzin – well known for his ‘great prudence and affable conversation’ – gets the ball rolling with an eloquent appeal for the Tlaxcalteca to follow his lead (indeed, to follow what the gods and ancestors ordained), and ally with Cortés to rise up against their common Aztec oppressors. His reasoning is widely accepted in the council, until that is, Xicotencatl the Elder – by then over 100 years old and almost blind – intervenes.
关键段落在第三册中。科尔特斯仍与他新发现的托托纳克盟友在城外扎营。大使们在西班牙人和特拉斯卡拉市议会(Ayuntamiento)之间来回走动,并在那里开始了讨论。经过多次欢迎和亲吻,一位名叫 Maxixcatzin 的领主 —— 以 “非常谨慎和和蔼可亲的谈话” 而闻名 —— 以雄辩的方式呼吁特拉斯卡拉人跟随他的领导(事实上,跟随神和祖先的命令),与科尔特斯结盟,共同反对他们共同的阿兹特克压迫者。他的理由在议会中被广泛接受,直到长老西科滕卡特 —— 当时已超过 100 岁,几乎失明 —— 出面干预。
A chapter follows, detailing ‘the brave speech that Xicotencatl made, contradicting Maxixcatzin’. Nothing, he reminds the council, is harder to resist than an ‘enemy within’, which is what the newcomers will likely become if welcomed into town. Why, asks Xicotencatl,
接下来有一章,详细介绍了 “Xicotencatl 发表的勇敢的演讲,与 Maxixcatzin 相矛盾”。他提醒委员会,没有什么比 “内部的敌人” 更难抵抗的了,如果欢迎新来的人进城,他们很可能会变成这样。为什么呢,希科特卡特尔问道,
… does Maxixcatzin deem these people gods, who seem more like ravenous monsters thrown up by the intemperate sea to blight us, gorging themselves on gold, silver, stones, and pearls; sleeping in their own clothes; and generally acting in the manner of those who would one day make cruel masters … There are barely enough chickens, rabbits, or corn-fields in the entire land to feed their bottomless appetites, or those of their ravenous ‘deer’ [the Spanish horses]. Why would we – who live without servitude, and never acknowledged a king – spill our blood, only to make ourselves into slaves?55
…… Maxixcatzin 认为这些人是神,他们似乎更像是暴躁的大海为了祸害我们而抛出的贪婪的怪物,以金、银、宝石和珍珠为食;穿着自己的衣服睡觉;通常以那些有一天会成为残酷的主人的方式行事…… 整个土地上几乎没有足够的鸡、兔子或玉米田来满足他们无底的胃口,或者他们贪婪的 “鹿”(西班牙马)。为什么我们 —— 生活中没有奴役,也从未承认过一个国王 —— 要抛头颅洒热血,只为使自己成为奴隶?55
Members of the council, we learn, were swayed by Xicotencatl’s words: ‘a murmur began among them, speaking with each other, the voices were rising, each one declaring what he felt.’ The council was divided, and without consensus. What followed would be familiar to anyone who has participated in a process of consensus decision-making: when matters seem to come to loggerheads, rather than putting it to a vote someone proposes a creative synthesis. Temilotecutl – one of the city’s four ‘senior justices’ – stepped in with a cunning plan. To satisfy both sides of the debate, Cortés would be invited into the city, but as soon as he entered Tlaxcalteca territory the city’s leading general, Xicotencatl the Younger, would ambush him, together with a contingent of Otomí warriors. If the ambush succeeded, they would be heroes. If it failed, they would blame it on the uncouth and impulsive Otomí, make their excuses, and ally themselves with the invaders.
我们了解到,议会成员被希科坦卡的话语所动摇。“他们中间开始有了杂音,互相交谈,声音越来越大,每个人都在宣称自己的感受。议会出现了分歧,而且没有达成共识。” 任何参与过共识决策过程的人都会对接下来的情况感到熟悉:当事情似乎陷入僵局时,不是,而是有人提出一个创造性的综合方案。Temilotecutl —— 该市四个 “高级法官” 之一 —— 以一个狡猾的计划介入。为了满足辩论双方的要求,科尔特斯将被邀请进城,但他一进入特拉斯卡尔特卡的领地,该城的主要将领小西科滕卡特尔就会和一支奥托米战士特遣队一起伏击他。如果伏击成功,他们将成为英雄。如果失败了,他们会把责任归咎于粗鲁和冲动的奥托米人,为自己找借口,并与入侵者结盟。
We need not rehearse here the events leading to an alliance between Tlaxcala and Cortés;56 we have said enough to give the reader a flavour of our sources concerning the democracy of Tlaxcala, and the facility of its politicians in reasoned debate. Such accounts have not fared well in the hands of modern historians. Few would go so far as to suggest that what de Salazar described never really happened, or was simply his own imagination of a scene from some ancient Greek agora or Roman senate, placed into the mouths of ‘Indians’. Yet on those rare occasions when the Crónica is considered by scholars today, it is mostly as a contribution to the literary genre of early Catholic humanism rather than as a source of historical information about indigenous forms of government – in much the same way that commentators on the writings of Lahontan never really concern themselves with what Kandiaronk might actually have argued, but dwell on the possibility that some passages might be inspired by Greek satirists like Lucian.57
我们不需要在这里重述导致特拉斯卡拉和科尔特斯结盟的事件。56我们已经说得够多了,可以让读者了解我们关于特拉斯卡拉的民主制度以及其政治家在理性辩论方面的能力的资料。这种说法在现代历史学家的手中并不顺利。很少有人会认为德·萨拉萨尔所描述的事情从未真正发生过,或者只是他自己对某个古希腊广场或罗马元老院的场景的想象,并将其放在 “印第安人” 的口中。然而,在今天的学者们考虑《新西班牙记》的那些罕见的场合,它主要是作为对早期天主教人文主义文学流派的贡献,而不是作为关于本土政府形式的历史信息来源 —— 就像评论家们对拉洪坦的著作从未真正关注过坎迪阿伦克实际上可能的论点,而是纠缠于某些段落可能受到卢西恩等希腊讽刺作家的启发一样。57
There is a subtle snobbery at play here. It’s not so much that anyone denies outright that accounts of deliberative politics reflect historical reality; it’s just that no one seems to find this fact particularly interesting. What seems interesting to historians is invariably the relation of these accounts to European textual traditions, or European expectations. Much the same occurs with the treatment of later texts from Tlaxcala: extant, detailed written records of the proceedings at its municipal council in the decades following the Spanish conquest, the Tlaxcalan Actas, which affirm at length both the oratorical skills of indigenous politicians and their facility with principles of consensus decision-making and reasoned debate.58
这里有一种微妙的势利眼在起作用。并不是说没有人断然否认关于协商政治的描述反映了历史现实;只是似乎没有人觉得这个事实特别有趣。对历史学家来说,有趣的是这些描述与欧洲文本传统的关系,或者欧洲人的期望。在处理来自特拉斯卡拉的后期文本时也出现了同样的情况:现存的西班牙征服后数十年间的市议会的详细书面记录,即《特拉斯卡拉法案》,其中详细肯定了本土政治家的演说技巧以及他们对共识决策和合理辩论原则的掌握。58
You might think all this would be of interest to historians. Instead, what really seems to strike them as worthy of debate is the degree to which democratic mores displayed in the texts might be some sort of near-miraculous adaptation by ‘astute Indians’ to the political expectations of their European masters: effectively some kind of elaborate play-acting.59 Why such historians imagine that a collection of sixteenth-century Spanish friars, petty aristocrats and soldiers were likely to know anything about democratic procedure (much less, be impressed by it) is unclear, because educated opinion in Europe was almost uniformly anti-democratic at the time. If anyone was learning something new from the encounter, it was surely the Spaniards.
你可能认为所有这些都会引起历史学家的兴趣。相反,他们认为真正值得讨论的是,文本中显示的民主道德在多大程度上可能是 “精明的印第安人” 对其欧洲主人的政治期望的某种近乎神奇的适应:实际上是某种精心设计的戏剧表演。59为什么这些历史学家会认为 16 世纪的西班牙修士、小贵族和士兵有可能对民主程序有所了解(更不用说留下深刻印象了),这一点并不清楚,因为当时欧洲的教育观点几乎都是反民主的。如果说有人从这场交锋中学到了什么新东西,那肯定是西班牙人。
In the current intellectual climate, to suggest the Tlaxcalteca were anything but cynics or victims is considered just a tiny bit dangerous: one is opening oneself up to charges of naive romanticism.60 In fact, these days more or less any attempt to suggest that Europeans learned anything at all of moral or social value from Native American people is likely to be met with mild derision and accusations of indulging in ‘noble savage’ tropes, or occasionally almost hysterical condemnation.61
在目前的知识氛围中,认为 特拉斯卡拉人除了是愤世嫉俗者或受害者之外,还被认为有一点危险:一个人正在向自己提出天真的浪漫主义的指控。60事实上,这些天来,任何暗示欧洲人从美洲原住民那里学到任何道德或社会价值的尝试,都有可能受到温和的嘲笑和沉溺于 “高贵的野蛮人” 的指责,或者偶尔会受到几乎歇斯底里的谴责。61
But a strong case can be made that the deliberations recorded in Spanish sources are exactly what they seem to be – a glimpse into the mechanics of collective indigenous government – and if these deliberations bear any superficial resemblance to debates recorded in Thucydides or Xenophon, this is because, well, there are really only so many ways to conduct a political debate. At least one Spanish source provides explicit confirmation in this regard. Here we turn to Friar Toribio of Benavente, called by locals Motolinía (the ‘afflicted one’) for his ragged appearance, a sobriquet he seems to have happily adopted. It is to Motolinía and his Tlaxcalteca informants – who included Antonio Xicotencatl, most likely a grandson of Xicotencatl the Elder – that we owe the Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España (1541).62
但是,我们可以提出一个强有力的理由,即西班牙资料中记录的审议正是它们看起来的那样 —— 对本土集体政府机制的一瞥 —— 如果这些审议与修昔底德或色诺芬中记录的辩论有任何表面上的相似之处,这是因为,嗯,进行政治辩论的方式真的只有这么多。至少有一个西班牙来源在这方面提供了明确的确认。这里我们要提到贝纳文特的托里比奥修士,由于他衣衫褴褛,被当地人称为莫托利尼亚(“受折磨的人”),他似乎很乐意采用这个绰号。正是由于莫托利尼亚和他在特拉斯卡尔特卡的线人 —— 其中包括安东尼奥·希科滕卡特,他很可能是希科滕卡特老爷子的孙子 —— 我们才有了《新西班牙印第安人史》(1541 年)。62
Motolinía confirms Cortés’s original observation: that Tlaxcala was indeed an indigenous republic governed not by a king, nor even by rotating office holders (as at Cholula), but by a council of elected officials (teuctli) answerable to the citizenry as a whole. Exactly how many sat on the high council of Tlaxcala is not clear: Spanish sources suggest any number from fifty to 200. Perhaps it depended on the matter at hand. Neither, unfortunately, does he tell us anything in detail about how these individuals were selected for office, or who was eligible (other Pueblan cities, including royal ones, rotated official duties among representatives of calpolli) . On the topic of Tlaxcalteca modes of political training and instruction, however, Motolinía’s account comes alive.
莫托利尼亚证实了科尔特斯最初的观察:特拉斯卡拉确实是一个土著共和国,它不是由国王管理,甚至也不是由轮流任职的人管理(如在乔鲁拉),而是由一个对全体公民负责的民选官员(teuctli)理事会管理。特拉斯卡拉高级议会的确切人数并不清楚:西班牙资料显示,人数从 50 到 200 不等。也许这取决于手头的事情。不幸的是,他也没有详细告诉我们这些人是如何被挑选出来担任职务的,或者谁有资格 (其他普埃布兰城市,包括皇家城市,在 calpolli 的代表中轮流担任公务)。然而,关于 特拉斯卡拉的政治培训和指导模式的话题,莫托利尼亚的叙述很生动。
Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to demonstrate personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprecation – even shame. They were required to subordinate themselves to the people of the city. To ensure that this subordination was no mere show, each was subject to trials, starting with mandatory exposure to public abuse, regarded as the proper reward of ambition, and then – with one’s ego in tatters – a long period of seclusion, in which the aspiring politician suffered ordeals of fasting, sleep deprivation, bloodletting and a strict regime of moral instruction. The initiation ended with a ‘coming out’ of the newly constituted public servant, amid feasting and celebration.63
那些有志于在特拉斯卡拉议会任职的人,远没有被期望表现出个人魅力或超越对手的能力,而是本着自我贬低的精神 —— 甚至是羞愧。他们被要求从属于该城市的人民。为了确保这种从属关系不只是作秀,每个人都要接受考验,首先是强制性地暴露在公众的虐待之下,这被认为是对野心的适当回报,然后 —— 随着自我的破灭 —— 是一段长期的隐居,在这期间,有抱负的政治家遭受禁食、剥夺睡眠、放血和严格的道德教育制度的折磨。启蒙教育以新组建的公务员的 “出狱” 结束,在宴会和庆祝中进行。63
Clearly, taking up office in this indigenous democracy required personality traits very different to those we take for granted in modern electoral politics. On this latter point, it is worth recalling that ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency for elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. This is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles; and why for much of European history the truly democratic way of filling offices was assumed to be by lottery.
显然,在这个本土民主国家就职需要的人格特征与我们在现代选举政治中认为理所当然的人格特征非常不同。关于后一点,值得回顾的是,古希腊作家很清楚选举会产生具有暴政倾向的魅力领袖。这就是为什么他们认为选举是一种贵族式的政治任命方式,与民主原则完全相悖;也是为什么在欧洲历史的大部分时间里,填补职位的真正民主方式被认为是通过抽签。
Cortés may have praised Tlaxcala as an agrarian and commercial arcadia but, as Motolinía explains, when its citizens thought about their own political values, they actually saw those values as coming from the desert. Like other Nahuatl speakers, including the Aztecs, Tlaxcalteca liked to claim they were descended from Chichimec. These were considered the original hunter-gatherers who lived ascetic lives in deserts and forests, dwelling in primitive huts, ignorant of village or city life, rejecting corn and cooked food, bereft of clothing or organized religion, and living on wild things alone.64 The ordeals endured by aspiring councillors in Tlaxcala were reminders of the need to cultivate Chichimec qualities (ultimately to be balanced by the Toltec virtues of an urbane warrior; and just where the correct balance lay was much debated among the Tlaxcalteca).
科尔特斯可能称赞特拉斯卡拉是一个农业和商业的弧形地带,但正如莫托利尼亚所解释的,当其公民思考他们自己的政治价值时,他们实际上认为这些价值来自沙漠。像其他讲纳瓦特尔语的人一样,包括阿兹特克人,特拉斯卡拉人喜欢声称他们是奇奇梅克人的后代。这些人被认为是原始的狩猎采集者,他们在沙漠和森林中过着苦行僧般的生活,住在原始的小屋里,对村庄或城市生活一无所知,拒绝玉米和熟食,没有衣服或有组织的宗教,只靠野物生活。64特拉斯卡拉有抱负的议员所经受的磨难,提醒他们需要培养 Chichimec 的品质(最终要由托尔特克人的城市战士的美德来平衡;而正确的平衡点在哪里,在特拉斯卡拉人中有很多争论)。
If all this sounds a little familiar, we must ask ourselves why. The Spanish friars will no doubt have heard echoes in these tales of Old World tropes for republican virtue – that same atavistic streak running from the biblical prophets through to Ibn Khaldun, not to mention their own ethic of world renunciation. The correspondences are so close that one begins to wonder if, in their auto-ethnography, the Tlaxcalteca in this case actually did present themselves to Spaniards in terms they knew would be instantly recognized and understood. Certainly, we know that the citizens of Tlaxcala staged some remarkable theatrical spectacles for the benefit of their conquerors, including a 1539 pageant of the Crusader Conquest of Jerusalem, in which the climax was a mass baptism of (actual) pagans, dressed up as Moors.65
如果这一切听起来有点熟悉,我们必须问问自己为什么。西班牙修士无疑在这些故事中听到了旧世界共和主义美德的回声 —— 从《圣经》中的先知到伊本·霍尔敦,都有这种不良倾向,更不用说他们自己放弃世界的伦理。这些对应关系是如此接近,以至于人们开始怀疑,在他们的自传中,特拉斯卡拉人是否真的以他们知道会被立即识别和理解的术语向西班牙人展示了自己。当然,我们知道特拉斯卡拉的公民为了征服者的利益上演了一些出色的戏剧表演,包括 1539 年十字军征服耶路撒冷的庆典,其中的高潮是装扮成摩尔人的(实际)异教徒的集体洗礼。65
Spanish observers may even have learned from Tlaxcalteca or Aztec sources what it means to have once been a ‘noble savage’. Nor can we rule out the possibility that indigenous Mexican ideas on the subject entered wider streams of European political thought that gathered force only in the days of Rousseau, whose State of Nature maps with alarming fidelity on to Motolinía’s account of the Chichimec, right down to the ‘primitive hut dwellings’ in which they were supposed to have lived. Perhaps some of the seeds of our own evolutionary story about how it all began with simple, egalitarian hunter-gatherers were sown right there, in the imaginations of city-dwelling Amerindians.
西班牙观察家甚至可能从特拉斯卡拉或阿兹特克人的资料中了解到曾经是一个 “高贵的野蛮人” 意味着什么。我们也不能排除这样的可能性,即墨西哥人关于这个问题的想法进入了更广泛的欧洲政治思想流,这些思想在卢梭的时代聚集了力量,他的《自然状态》以惊人的忠实度映射了莫托利尼亚关于奇奇梅克人的描述,直到他们被认为居住的 “原始小屋” 为止。也许我们自己的进化故事的一些种子就在那里,在居住在城市的美洲印第安人的想象中,开始了简单、平等的狩猎·采集者。
But we digress.
但我们离题了。
Amid all this mutual positioning, what can we really conclude about the political constitution of Tlaxcala at the time of the Spanish conquest? Was it really a functioning urban democracy and, if so, how many other such democracies might have existed in the pre-Columbian Americas? Or are we confronting a mirage, a strategic conjuring of the ‘ideal commonwealth’, supplied to a receptive audience of millenarian friars? Were elements of history and mimesis both at work?
在所有这些相互定位中,我们对西班牙征服时特拉斯卡拉的政治结构能得出什么真正的结论?它真的是一个有效的城市民主制度吗?如果是的话,在哥伦布时代之前的美洲,还有多少这样的民主制度可能存在?或者说,我们面对的是一个海市蜃楼,是对 “理想国” 的战略性幻化,提供给接受的千禧年修士的观众?历史和模仿的因素是否都在起作用?
If all we had to go on were written sources, there would always be room for doubt; but archaeologists confirm that by the fourteenth century AD the city of Tlaxcala was, in fact, already organized on an entirely different basis to Tenochtitlan. There is no sign of a palace or central temple, and no major ball-court (an important setting, recall, for royal ritual in other Mesoamerican cities). Instead, archaeological survey reveals a cityscape given over almost entirely to the well-appointed residences of its citizens, constructed to uniformly high standards around more than twenty district plazas, all raised up on grand earthen terraces. The largest municipal assemblies were housed in a civic complex called Tizatlan, but this was located outside the city itself, with spaces for public gatherings entered via broad gateways.66
如果我们只能依靠书面资料,那么总是会有怀疑的余地;但考古学家证实,到了公元 14 世纪,特拉斯卡拉市实际上已经在与特诺奇蒂特兰完全不同的基础上组织起来。这里没有宫殿或中央神庙的迹象,也没有主要的会馆(回顾一下,在其他中美洲城市,球馆是皇室仪式的重要场所)。相反,考古学调查显示,城市景观几乎全部是市民的精装住宅,这些住宅按照统一的高标准建造在 20 多个地区的广场周围,都是在宏伟的土台阶上升起。最大的市政会议设在一个名为 Tizatlan 的市政综合体中,但它位于城市本身之外,公共集会的空间通过宽阔的门道进入。66
Modern archaeological investigations thus confirm the existence of an indigenous republic at Tlaxcala long before Cortés set foot on Mexican soil, while later written sources leave us in little doubt as to its democratic credentials. The contrasts with other known Mesoamerican cities of the time are quite striking – though it should also be said that fifth-century Athens was something of an outlier, surrounded by petty kingdoms and oligarchies. Nor should these contrasts be overdrawn. What we have learned in this chapter is that the political traditions of Tlaxcala are not an anomaly, but lie in one broad stream of urban development which can be traced back, in outline, to the experiments in social welfare undertaken 1,000 years earlier at Teotihuacan. Despite Aztec claims to a special relationship with that abandoned city, Tlaxcala was at least as much a part of its legacy as the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan – and in most really significant ways, more so.
因此,现代考古调查证实,早在科尔特斯踏上墨西哥土地之前,特拉斯卡拉就存在一个土著共和国,而后来的书面资料让我们对其民主资格几乎没有疑问。与当时其他已知的中美洲城市相比,这些反差是相当惊人的 —— 尽管也应该说,五世纪的雅典是一个异类,被小王国和寡头统治所包围。这些对比也不应该被过分夸大。我们在本章中了解到的是,特拉斯卡拉的政治传统并不是一种反常现象,而是位于城市发展的一个大流中,可以大致追溯到 1000 年前在特奥蒂瓦坎进行的社会福利实验。尽管阿兹特克人声称与那个被遗弃的城市有着特殊的关系,但特拉斯卡拉至少和阿兹特克人的首都特诺奇蒂特兰一样是其遗产的一部分 —— 而且在大多数真正重要的方面,更是如此。
After all, it was the Aztec rulers of Tenochtitlan who finally broke with tradition, creating a predatory empire that was in some ways closer to the dominant European political models of the time, or what has since come to be known as ‘the state’. In the next chapter, we intend to turn back and consider this term. What precisely is a state? Does it really mark an entirely new phase of human history? Is the term even useful any more?
毕竟,是特诺奇蒂特兰的阿兹特克统治者最终打破了传统,创建了一个掠夺性的帝国,在某些方面更接近于当时欧洲的主流政治模式,或者说是后来被称为 “国家” 的东西。在下一章中,我们打算回头考虑一下这个术语。确切地说,国家是什么?它真的标志着人类历史的一个全新的阶段吗?这个词还有用吗?
The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics
The quest for the ‘origins of the state’ is almost as long-standing, and hotly contested, as the pursuit of the ‘origins of social inequality’ – and in many ways, it is just as much of a fool’s errand. It is generally accepted that, today, pretty much everyone in the world lives under the authority of a state; likewise, a broad feeling exists that past polities such as Pharaonic Egypt, Shang China, the Inca Empire or the kingdom of Benin qualify as states, or at least as ‘early states’. However, with no consensus among social theorists about what a state actually is, the problem is how to come up with a definition that includes all these cases but isn’t so broad as to be absolutely meaningless. This has proved surprisingly hard to do.
对 “国家起源” 的探索几乎与对 “社会不平等的起源” 的追求一样源远流长,而且争议激烈 —— 在许多方面,这也是一个愚蠢的任务。人们普遍认为,今天,世界上几乎每个人都生活在一个国家的权威之下;同样,人们普遍认为,过去的政体,如法老埃及、商代中国、印加帝国或贝宁王国,都有资格成为国家,或者至少是 “早期国家”。然而,由于社会理论家们对国家究竟是什么并没有达成共识,问题在于如何提出一个包括所有这些情况但又不至于宽泛到毫无意义的定义。事实证明,这一点令人惊讶地难以做到。
Our term ‘the state’ only came into common usage in the late sixteenth century, when it was coined by a French lawyer named Jean Bodin, who also wrote, among many other things, an influential treatise on witchcraft, werewolves and the history of sorcerers. (He is further remembered today for his profound hatred of women.) But perhaps the first to attempt a systematic definition was a German philosopher named Rudolf von Ihering, who, in the late nineteenth century, proposed that a state should be defined as any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory (this definition has since come to be identified with the sociologist Max Weber). On this definition, a government is a ‘state’ if it lays claim to a certain stretch of land and insists that, within its borders, it is the only institution whose agents can kill people, beat them up, cut off parts of their body or lock them in cages; or, as von Ihering emphasized, that can decide who else has the right to do so on its behalf.
我们的术语 “国家” 在十六世纪末才被普遍使用,当时它是由一位名叫让·博丹的法国律师创造的,除其他许多事情外,他还写了一篇关于巫术、狼人和巫师历史的有影响力的论文。(但也许第一个尝试系统定义的是一位名叫鲁道夫·冯·伊赫林的德国哲学家,他在 19 世纪末提出,国家应被定义为任何声称在特定领土内垄断合法使用强制力的机构(这一定义后来被社会学家马克斯·韦伯所认同)。根据这个定义,如果一个政府声称拥有某片土地,并坚持认为在其边界内,它是唯一的机构,其代理人可以杀人、打人、砍掉他们身体的一部分或把他们锁在笼子里;或者,正如冯·伊赫林所强调的,它可以决定还有谁有权代表它这样做。
Von Ihering’s definition worked fairly well for modern states. However, it soon became clear that for most of human history, rulers either didn’t make such grandiose claims – or, if they did, their claims to a monopoly on coercive force held about the same status as their claims to control the tides or the weather. To retain von Ihering and Weber’s definition one would either have to conclude that, say, Hammurabi’s Babylon, Socrates’ Athens or England under William the Conqueror weren’t states at all – or come up with a more flexible or nuanced definition. Marxists offered one: they suggested that states make their first appearance in history to protect the power of an emerging ruling class. As soon as one has a group of people living routinely off the labour of another, the argument ran, they will necessarily create an apparatus of rule, officially to protect their property rights, in reality to preserve their advantage (a line of thinking very much in the tradition of Rousseau). This definition brought Babylon, Athens and medieval England back into the fold, but also introduced new conceptual problems, such as how to define exploitation. And it was unpalatable to liberals, ruling out any possibility that the state could ever become a benevolent institution.
冯·伊赫林的定义对现代国家来说相当有效。然而,人们很快就会发现,在人类历史上的大部分时间里,统治者要么没有提出这样宏大的主张,要么即使提出了,他们对垄断强制力的主张与他们对控制潮汐或天气的主张拥有同样的地位。如果要保留冯·伊赫林和韦伯的定义,人们就必须得出结论,例如汉谟拉比的巴比伦、苏格拉底的雅典或征服者威廉的英格兰根本就不是国家 —— 或者提出一个更灵活或细微的定义。马克思主义者提供了一个定义:他们认为,国家在历史上首次出现是为了保护一个新兴统治阶级的权力。他们认为,只要有一群人按部就班地依靠另一群人的劳动而生活,他们就必然会建立一个统治机构,官方说法是为了保护他们的财产权,实际上是为了维护他们的利益(这种思路非常符合卢梭的传统)。这个定义把巴比伦、雅典和中世纪的英国拉回了正轨,但也带来了新的概念问题,比如如何定义剥削。而且,这对自由主义者来说是不可取的,因为它排除了国家可能成为一个仁慈机构的任何可能性。
For much of the twentieth century, social scientists preferred to define a state in more purely functional terms. As society became more complex, they argued, it was increasingly necessary for people to create top-down structures of command in order to co-ordinate everything. This same logic is still followed in essence by most contemporary theorists of social evolution. Evidence of ‘social complexity’ is automatically treated as evidence for the existence of some sort of governing apparatus. If one can speak, say, of a settlement hierarchy with four levels (e.g. cities, towns, villages, hamlets), and if at least some of those settlements also contained full-time craft specialists (potters, blacksmiths, monks and nuns, professional soldiers or musicians), then whatever apparatus administered it must ipso facto be a state. And even if that apparatus did not claim a monopoly of force, or support a class of elites living off the toil of benighted labourers, this was inevitably going to happen sooner or later. This definition, too, has its advantages, especially when speculating about very ancient societies, whose nature and organization has to be teased out from fragmentary remains; but its logic is entirely circular. Basically, all it says is that, since states are complicated, any complicated social arrangement must therefore be a state.
在二十世纪的大部分时间里,社会科学家倾向于用更纯粹的功能术语来定义国家。他们认为,随着社会变得越来越复杂,人们越来越需要建立自上而下的指挥结构,以协调一切。大多数当代的社会演化理论家在本质上仍然遵循这种逻辑。“社会复杂性” 的证据被自动视为存在某种管理机构的证据。如果我们可以说,一个有四个层次的居住区(如城市、城镇、村庄、小村庄),如果这些居住区中至少有一些还包含全职的手工艺专家(陶工、铁匠、僧侣和修女、职业军人或音乐家),那么,无论什么机构来管理它,都必须当然地成为一个国家。即使这个机构没有要求垄断武力,或支持一个靠穷苦劳动者的劳作为生的精英阶层,这也不可避免地迟早会发生。这个定义也有其优点,特别是在推测非常古老的社会时,其性质和组织必须从零星的遗迹中挖掘出来;但其逻辑完全是循环的。基本上,它说的是,由于国家是复杂的,因此任何复杂的社会安排都必须是一个国家。
Actually, almost all these ‘classic’ theoretical formulations of the last century started off from exactly this assumption: that any large and complex society necessarily required a state. The real bone of contention was, why? Was it for good practical reasons? Or was it because any such society would necessarily produce a material surplus, and if there was a material surplus – like, for instance, all that smoked fish on the Pacific Northwest Coast – then there would also, necessarily, be people who managed to grab hold of a disproportionate share?
实际上,上个世纪几乎所有这些 “经典” 的理论表述都是从这个假设开始的:任何大型和复杂的社会都必然需要一个国家。真正的争论点是,为什么?是出于良好的实际原因?还是因为任何这样的社会必然会产生物质盈余,如果有物质盈余 —— 例如,像太平洋西北海岸的所有烟熏鱼 —— 那么也必然会有一些人设法抓住不成比例的份额?
As we’ve already seen in Chapter Eight, these assumptions don’t hold up particularly well for the earliest cities. Early Uruk, for example, does not appear to have been a ‘state’ in any meaningful sense of the word; what’s more, when top-down rule does emerge in the region of ancient Mesopotamia, it’s not in the ‘complex’ metropolises of the lowland river valleys, but among the small, ‘heroic’ societies of the surrounding foothills, which were averse to the very principle of administration and, as a result, don’t seem to qualify as ‘states’ either. If there is a good ethnographic parallel for these latter groups it might be the societies of the Northwest Coast, since there too political leadership lay in the hands of a boastful and vainglorious warrior aristocracy, competing in extravagant contests over titles, treasures, the allegiance of commoners and the ownership of slaves. Recall, here, that Haida, Tlingit and the rest not only lacked anything that could be called a state apparatus; they lacked any kind of formal governmental institutions.1
正如我们在第八章中所看到的,这些假设在最早的城市中并不成立。例如,早期的乌鲁克似乎并不是任何有意义的 “国家”;此外,当自上而下的统治在古代美索不达米亚地区出现时,它并不是在低地河谷的 “复杂” 大都市中,而是在周围山麓的小型 “英雄” 社会中,这些社会厌恶行政管理的原则,因此,似乎也没有资格成为 “国家”。如果有一个很好的人种学上的平行,那就是西北海岸的社会,因为那里的政治领导权也掌握在一个夸夸其谈、虚荣的武士贵族手中,他们为了头衔、财物、平民的效忠和奴隶的所有权而进行奢侈的竞争。在此回顾一下,海达人、特林吉特人和其他民族不仅缺乏任何可被称为国家机器的东西;他们也缺乏任何形式的正式政府机构。1
One might then argue that ‘states’ first emerged when the two forms of governance (bureaucratic and heroic) merged together. A case could be made. But equally we might ask if this is really such a significant issue in the first place? If it is possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state (as it evidently was); and if it’s equally possible to maintain complex irrigation systems, or develop science and abstract philosophy without a state (as it also appears to be), then what do we actually learn about human history by establishing that one political entity is what we would like to describe as a ‘state’ and another isn’t? Are there not more interesting and important questions we could be asking?
那么,人们可能会认为,“国家” 是在两种治理形式(官僚主义和英雄主义)合并在一起时首次出现的。这种说法是可以成立的。但同样我们可能会问,这是否真的是一个重要的问题?如果有可能拥有君主、贵族、奴隶制和极端形式的父权统治,甚至没有国家(显然是这样);如果同样有可能维持复杂的灌溉系统,或者在没有国家的情况下发展科学和抽象哲学(似乎也是这样),那么通过确定一个政治实体是我们想描述的 “国家”,而,我们实际上对人类历史学到了什么?难道我们不可以问一些更有趣、更重要的问题吗?
In this chapter we are going to explore the possibility that there are. What would history look like if – instead of assuming that there must be some deep internal resemblance between the governments of, say, ancient Egypt and modern Britain, and our task is therefore to figure out precisely what it is – we were to look at the whole problem with new eyes. There is no doubt that, in most of the areas that saw the rise of cities, powerful kingdoms and empires also eventually emerged. What did they have in common? Did they, in fact, have anything in common? What does their appearance really tell us about the history of human freedom and equality, or its loss? In what way, if any, do they mark a fundamental break with what came before?
在本章中,我们将探讨存在这种可能性的问题。如果 —— 而不是假设古埃及和现代英国的政府之间一定存在某种深刻的内部相似性,因此我们的任务就是要准确地找出这种相似性 —— 我们要用新的眼光来看待整个问题,历史会是什么样子。毫无疑问,在大多数看到城市崛起的地区,最终也出现了强大的王国和帝国。他们有什么共同点?事实上,他们有什么共同点吗?它们的出现到底告诉了我们关于人类自由和平等的历史,或者说它的丧失?如果有的话,它们在哪些方面标志着与之前的东西的根本决裂?
The best way to go about this task, we suggest, is by returning to first principles. We have already talked about fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey orders; the freedom to reorganize social relations. Can we speak similarly about elementary forms of domination?
我们建议,完成这项任务的最佳方式是回到第一原则。我们已经谈到了基本的、甚至是初级的自由形式:行动的自由;不服从命令的自由;重组社会关系的自由。我们能否以类似的方式谈论基本的统治形式?
Recall how Rousseau, in his famous thought experiment, felt that everything went back to private property, and especially property in land: in that terrible moment when a man first threw up a barrier and said, ‘This territory is mine, and mine alone’, all subsequent forms of domination – and therefore, all subsequent catastrophes – became inevitable. As we’ve seen, this obsession with property rights as the basis of society, and as a foundation of social power, is a peculiarly Western phenomenon – indeed, if ‘the West’ has any real meaning, it would probably refer to that legal and intellectual tradition which conceives society in those terms. So, to begin a thought experiment of a slightly different kind, it might be good to start right here. What are we really saying when we say that the power of a feudal aristocracy, or a landed gentry, or absentee landlords is ‘based on land’?
回想一下,卢梭在他著名的思想实验中,觉得一切都回到了私有财产,特别是土地财产:在那个可怕的时刻,当一个人第一次竖起屏障,说 “这块领土是我的,而且只属于我”,所有随后的统治形式 —— 因此,所有随后的灾难 —— 都变得不可避免了。正如我们所看到的,这种对产权作为社会基础和社会权力基础的痴迷,是一种特殊的西方现象 —— 事实上,如果 “西方” 有任何真正的意义,它可能是指在这些方面构想社会的法律和知识传统。因此,为了开始一个略微不同的思想实验,从这里开始也许是好的。当我们说封建贵族、地主阶级或缺席地主的权力是 “基于土地” 的时候,我们到底在说什么?
Often we use such language as a way of cutting through airy abstractions or high-minded pretensions to address simple material realities. For example, the two dominant political parties in nineteenth-century England, the Whigs and the Tories, liked to represent themselves as arguing about ideas: a certain conception of free-market liberalism versus a certain notion of tradition. An historical materialist might object that, in fact, Whigs represented the interests of the commercial classes, and the Tories those of the landowners. They are of course right. It would be foolhardy to deny it. What we might question, however, is the premise that ‘landed’ (or any other form of) property is itself particularly material. Yes: soil, stones, grass, hedges, farm buildings and granaries are all material things; but when one speaks of ‘landed property’ what one is really talking about is an individual’s claim to exclusive access and control over all the soil, stones, grass, hedges, etc. within a specific territory. In practice, this means a legal right to keep anyone else off it. Land is only really ‘yours’, in this sense, if no one would think to challenge your claim over it, or if you have the capacity to summon at will people with weapons to threaten or attack anyone who disagrees, or just enters without permission and refuses to leave. Even if you shoot the trespassers yourself, you still need others to agree you were within your rights to do so. In other words, ‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state’s monopoly of violence within a territory – just within a much smaller territory than a nation state.
我们常常使用这样的语言作为一种方式,来穿透空洞的抽象或高尚的自命不凡,以解决简单的物质现实。例如,19 世纪英国的两个主流政党,辉格党和托利党,喜欢把自己说成是关于思想的争论:某种自由市场自由主义的概念与某种传统的概念。历史唯物主义者可能会反对说,事实上,辉格党代表的是商业阶层的利益,而托利党代表的是地主的利益。他们当然是对的。否认这一点将是愚蠢的。然而,我们可以质疑的是,“土地”(或任何其他形式的)财产本身是特别物质的前提。是的:土壤、石头、草、树篱、农场建筑和粮仓都是物质的东西;但当人们谈到 “土地财产” 时,我们真正谈论的是个人对特定领土内所有土壤、石头、草、树篱等的独家使用和控制权。在实践中,这意味着有法律权利不让其他人进入。从这个意义上说,只有当没有人想到要挑战你对它的要求时,或者当你有能力随意召集带着武器的人去威胁或攻击任何不同意的人,或者未经允许就进入并拒绝离开时,土地才真正是 “你的”。即使你自己射杀入侵者,你仍然需要其他人同意你这样做是在你的权利范围内。换句话说,“土地财产” 不是实际的土壤、岩石或草地。它是一种法律理解,由道德和暴力威胁的微妙组合来维持。事实上,土地所有权完美地说明了鲁道夫·冯·伊赫林所称的国家在领土内垄断暴力的逻辑 —— 只是在一个比民族国家小得多的领土内。
All this might sound a little abstract, but it is a simple description of what happens in reality, as any reader who has ever tried to squat a piece of land, occupy a building or for that matter overthrow a government will be keenly aware. Ultimately, everyone knows it all comes down to whether someone will eventually be given orders to remove you by force, and if it does, then everything comes down to whether that someone is actually willing to follow orders. Revolutions are rarely won in open combat. When revolutionaries win, it’s usually because the bulk of those sent to crush them refuse to shoot, or just go home.
所有这些听起来可能有点抽象,但这是对现实中发生的事情的简单描述,正如任何曾经试图蹲在一块土地上、占领一栋大楼或为此而推翻一个政府的读者会敏锐地意识到的那样。归根结底,每个人都知道这一切都归结于是否有人最终会接到命令用武力把你赶走,如果是这样,那么一切都归结于这个人是否真的愿意服从命令。革命是,很少在公开的战斗中获胜。当革命者获胜时,通常是因为那些被派来镇压他们的人大部分都拒绝开枪,或者只是回家了。
So does that mean property, like political power, ultimately derives (as Chairman Mao so delicately put it) ‘from the barrel of a gun’ – or, at best, from the ability to command the loyalties of those trained to use them?
那么,这是否意味着财产,就像政治权力一样,最终来自于(正如毛主席如此微妙的说法)“枪杆子” —— 或者,充其量是来自于指挥那些受过训练的人使用它们的忠诚的能力?
No. Or not exactly.
不,或者说不完全是。
To illustrate why not, and continue our thought experiment, let’s take a different sort of property. Consider a diamond necklace. If Kim Kardashian walks down the street in Paris wearing a diamond necklace worth millions of dollars, she is not only showing off her wealth, she is also flaunting her power over violence, since everyone assumes she would not be able to do so without the existence, visible or not, of an armed personal security detail, trained to deal with potential thieves. Property rights of all sorts are ultimately backed up by what legal theorists like von Ihering euphemistically called ‘force’. But let us imagine, for a moment, what would happen if everyone on earth were suddenly to become physically invulnerable. Say they all drank a potion which made it impossible for anyone to harm anyone else. Could Kim Kardashian still maintain exclusive rights over her jewellery?
为了说明原因,并继续我们的思想实验,让我们采取一种不同的财产。考虑一条钻石项链。如果金·卡戴珊戴着一条价值数百万美元的钻石项链走在巴黎的大街上,她不仅是在炫耀她的财富,也是在炫耀她对暴力的权力,因为每个人都认为,如果没有一个武装的私人保安人员的存在(无论是否可见),她是不可能这样做的,因为他们受过训练来对付潜在的小偷。所有种类的财产权最终都是由像冯·伊赫林这样的法律理论家委婉地称之为 “武力” 来支持的。但是,让我们想象一下,如果地球上的每个人突然变得身体不受伤害,会发生什么。假设他们都喝了一种药水,使任何人都无法伤害其他人。金·卡戴珊还能保持对她的珠宝的专有权吗?
Well, perhaps not if she showed it off too regularly, since someone would presumably snatch it; but she certainly could if she normally kept it hidden in a safe, the combination of which she alone knew and only revealed to trusted audiences at events which were not announced in advance. So there is a second way of ensuring that one has access to rights others do not have: the control of information. Only Kim and her closest confidants know where the diamonds are normally kept, or when she is likely to appear wearing them. This obviously applies to all forms of property that are ultimately backed up by the ‘threat of force’ – landed property, wares in stores, and so forth. If humans were incapable of hurting each other, no one would be able to declare something absolutely sacred to themselves or to defend it against ‘all the world’. They could only exclude those who agreed to be excluded.
好吧,如果她过于频繁地展示它,也许就不会,因为有人可能会抢走它;但如果她通常把它藏在一个保险箱里,只有她自己知道保险箱的密码,并且只在没有事先宣布的活动中向可信的观众透露,她当然可以。因此,还有第二种方法可以确保一个人可以获得其他人没有的权利:控制信息。只有金和她最亲密的知己知道这些钻石通常存放在哪里,或者她什么时候可能戴着它们出现。这显然适用于所有最终由 “武力威胁” 支持的财产形式 —— 土地财产、商店里的商品,等等。如果人类没有能力互相伤害,就没有人能够宣布某些东西对他们自己来说是绝对神圣的,也没有人能够抵御 “全世界”。他们只能排除那些同意被排除的人。
Still, let us take the experiment a step further and imagine everyone on earth drank another potion which rendered them all incapable of keeping a secret, but still unable to harm one another physically as well. Access to information, as well as force, has now been equalized. Can Kim still keep her diamonds? Possibly. But only if she manages to convince absolutely everyone that, being Kim Kardashian, she is such a unique and extraordinary human being that she actually deserves to have things no one else can.
不过,让我们把实验再往前推一步,想象地球上的每个人,喝下另一种药水,使他们都不能保守秘密,但仍然不能在身体上伤害对方。获得信息以及武力的机会,现在已经平等了。金正日还能保留她的钻石吗?有可能。但前提是她必须设法让所有人相信,作为金·卡戴珊,她是如此独特和非凡的人,她实际上值得拥有其他人无法拥有的东西。
We would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power.2 The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree. Even in societies where interpersonal violence is rare, one may well find hierarchies based on knowledge. It doesn’t even particularly matter what that knowledge is about: maybe some sort of technical know-how (say, of smelting copper, or using herbal medicines); or maybe something we consider total mumbo jumbo (the names of the twenty-seven hells and thirty-nine heavens, and what creatures one would be likely to meet if one travelled there).
我们想说的是,这三个原则 —— 称之为控制暴力、控制信息和个人魅力 —— 也是社会权力的三个可能基础。2暴力威胁往往是最可靠的,这就是为什么它成为各地统一法律体系的基础;魅力往往是最短暂的。通常情况下,这三者在某种程度上是共存的。即使在人际暴力很少的社会中,人们也很可能发现基于知识的等级制度。这种知识的内容甚至并不特别重要:也许是某种技术诀窍(例如,冶炼铜,或使用草药);也许是我们认为完全是胡言乱语的东西(27 个地狱和 39 个天堂的名称,以及如果一个人去那里旅行,可能会遇到什么生物)。
Today, it is quite commonplace – for instance, in parts of Africa and Papua New Guinea – to find initiation ceremonies that are so complex as to require bureaucratic management, where initiates are gradually introduced to higher and higher levels of arcane knowledge, in societies where there are otherwise no formal ranks of any sort. Even where such hierarchies of knowledge do not exist, there will obviously always be individual differences. Some people will be considered more charming, funny, intelligent or physically attractive than others. This will always make some sort of difference, even within groups that develop elaborate safeguards to ensure that it doesn’t (as, for instance, with the ritual mockery of successful hunters among ‘egalitarian’ foragers like the Hadza).
今天,在没有任何正式等级的社会中,入会仪式非常复杂,以至于需要官僚管理,入会者被逐渐引入越来越高层次的神秘知识,这在非洲和巴布亚新几内亚的部分地区是很常见的。即使在不存在这种知识等级的地方,显然也会有个体差异。有些人将被认为比其他人更有魅力、更有趣、更聪明或更有身体吸引力。这总是会造成某种差异,即使在那些制定了详细的保障措施以确保其不存在的群体中也是如此(例如,在哈德萨人这样的 “平等主义” 觅食者中,对成功的猎手进行仪式性的嘲笑)。
As we’ve noted, an egalitarian ethos can take one of two directions: it can either deny such individual quirks entirely, and insist that people are (or at least should be) treated as if they were exactly the same; or it can celebrate their quirks in such a way as to imply that everyone is so profoundly different that any overall ranking would be inconceivable. (After all, how do you measure the best fisherman against the most dignified elder, against the person who tells the funniest jokes, and so on?). In such cases, it might happen that certain ‘extreme individuals’ – if we may call them that – do gain an outstanding, even leadership role. Here we might think of Nuer prophets, or certain Amazonian shamans, Malagasy mpomasy or astrologer-magicians, or for that matter the ‘rich’ burials of the Upper Palaeolithic, which so often focus on individuals with strikingly anomalous physical (and probably other) attributes. As those examples imply, however, such characters are so highly unusual that it would be difficult to turn their authority into any sort of ongoing power.
正如我们已经注意到的,平等主义的精神可以采取两个方向之一:它可以完全否认这种个人的怪癖,坚持认为人们被(或至少应该被)对待,好像他们是完全一样的;或者它可以以这样一种方式庆祝他们的怪癖,暗示每个人都是如此深刻的不同,任何总体排名都是不可想象的。(毕竟,你如何衡量最好的渔夫和最有尊严的长者,以及讲最有趣笑话的人,等等。)在这种情况下,可能会发生某些 “极端的人” —— 如果我们可以这样称呼他们 —— 确实获得了杰出的、甚至是领导的角色。在这里,我们可能会想到努尔族的先知,或某些亚马逊的巫师,马达加斯加的巫师或占星术士,或者就此事而言,旧石器时代上部的 “富人” 墓葬,往往集中在具有惊人的反常的身体(可能还有其他)属性的人。然而,正如这些例子所暗示的那样,这些人物是如此的不寻常,以至于很难将他们的权威变成任何形式的持续权力。
What really concerns us about these three principles is that each has become the basis for institutions now seen as foundational to the modern state. In the case of control over violence, this is obvious. Modern states are ‘sovereign’: they hold the power once held by kings, which in practice translates into von Ihering’s monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within their territory. In theory, a true sovereign exercised a power that was above and beyond the law. Ancient kings were rarely able to enforce this power systematically (often, as we’ve seen, their supposedly absolute power really just meant they were the only people who could mete out arbitrary violence within about 100 yards of where they were standing or sitting at any given time). In modern states, the very same kind of power is multiplied a thousand times because it is combined with the second principle: bureaucracy. As Weber, the great sociologist of bureaucracy, observed long ago, administrative organizations are always based not just on control of information, but also on ‘official secrets’ of one sort or another. This is why the secret agent has become the mythic symbol of the modern state. James Bond, with his licence to kill, combines charisma, secrecy and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine.
我们对这三项原则真正关注的是,每项原则都成为现在被视为现代国家基础的机构的基础。就对暴力的控制而言,这一点很明显。现代国家是 “主权国家”:它们拥有曾经由国王掌握的权力,这在实践中转化为冯·伊赫林对在其领土内合法使用强制力的垄断。在理论上,一个真正的主权国家行使的权力是高于和超越法律的。古代的国王很少能够系统地执行这种权力(正如我们所看到的,他们所谓的绝对权力实际上只是意味着他们是唯一能够在任何时候站在或坐着的地方的 100 码内任意施暴的人)。在现代国家中,同样的权力被放大了一千倍,因为它与第二个原则相结合:官僚主义。正如伟大的官僚机构社会学家韦伯很早以前所观察到的那样,行政组织总是不仅基于对信息的控制,而且还基于这样或那样的 “官方机密”。这就是为什么特工已经成为现代国家的神话象征。拥有杀人执照的詹姆斯·邦德将魅力、秘密和使用不负责任的暴力的权力结合在一起,并由一个巨大的官僚机器支撑着。
The combination of sovereignty with sophisticated administrative techniques for storing and tabulating information introduces all sorts of threats to individual freedom – it makes possible surveillance states and totalitarian regimes – but this danger, we are always assured, is offset by a third principle: democracy. Modern states are democratic, or at least it’s generally felt they really should be. Yet democracy, in modern states, is conceived very differently to, say, the workings of an assembly in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems. Rather, democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers.
主权与存储和统计信息的复杂行政技术相结合,给个人自由带来了各种威胁 —— 它使监视国家和极权主义政权成为可能 —— 但我们总是得到保证,这种危险被第三个原则所抵消:民主。现代国家是民主的,或者至少人们普遍认为它们确实应该是民主的。然而,在现代国家中,民主的概念与古代城市中议会的运作截然不同,后者对共同问题进行集体审议。相反,我们所知道的民主实际上是一场赢家和输家的游戏,在比生命更重要的个人之间进行,而我们其他人在很大程度上沦为旁观者。
If we are seeking an ancient precedent to this aspect of modern democracy, we shouldn’t turn to the assemblies of Athens, Syracuse or Corinth, but instead – paradoxically – to aristocratic contests of ‘heroic ages’, such as those described in the Iliad with its endless agons: races, duels, games, gifts and sacrifices. As we noted in Chapter Nine, the political philosophers of later Greek cities did not actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting candidates for public office at all. The democratic method was sortition, or lottery, much like modern jury duty. Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode (aristocracy meaning ‘rule of the best’), allowing commoners – much like the retainers in an old-fashioned, heroic aristocracy – to decide who among the well born should be considered best of all; and well born, in this context, simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing at politics.3
如果我们要为现代民主的这个方面寻找一个古代的先例,我们不应该转向雅典、锡拉库扎或科林斯的议会,而是 —— 矛盾的是 —— 转向 “英雄时代” 的贵族竞赛,比如《伊利亚特》中描述的那些无休止的激动:竞赛、决斗、游戏、礼物和牺牲。正如我们在第九章所指出的,后来希腊城市的政治哲学家们实际上根本不认为选举是选择公职候选人的民主方式。民主的方法是分类,或抽签,很像现代的陪审团职责。选举被认为属于贵族模式(贵族意味着 “最好的统治”),允许平民 —— 很像老式的英雄贵族中的家臣 —— 决定在出身良好的人中谁应该被认为是最好的;在这种情况下,出身良好仅仅意味着所有那些有能力花很多时间玩政治的人。3
Just as access to violence, information and charisma defines the very possibilities of social domination, so the modern state is defined as a combination of sovereignty, bureaucracy and a competitive political field.4 It seems only natural, then, that we should examine history in this light too; but as soon as we try to do so, we realize there is no actual reason why these three principles should go together, let alone reinforce each other in the precise fashion we have come to expect from governments today. For one thing, the three elementary forms of domination have entirely separate historical origins. We’ve already seen this in ancient Mesopotamia, where initially the bureaucratic-commercial societies of the river valleys existed in tension with the heroic polities of the hills and their endless petty princelings, vying for the loyalty of retainers through spectacular contests of one sort or another; while the hill people, in turn, rejected the very principle of administration.
正如获得暴力、信息和魅力决定了社会统治的可能性一样,现代国家也被定义为主权、官僚机构和竞争性政治领域的结合。4那么,我们似乎也应该从这个角度来审视历史;但是,一旦我们试图这样做,我们就会意识到,这三个原则没有任何实际的理由可以同时存在,更不用说以我们今天所期望的政府的精确方式相互加强了。首先,统治的三种基本形式有着完全不同的历史渊源。我们已经在古代美索不达米亚看到了这一点,在那里,最初河谷的官僚商业社会与山上的英雄政体及其无穷无尽的小王子们存在着紧张关系,通过这种或那种壮观的竞赛来争夺家臣的忠诚;而山上的人们则反过来拒绝行政管理的原则本身。
Nor is there any compelling evidence that ancient Mesopotamian cities, even when ruled by royal dynasties, achieved any measure of real territorial sovereignty, so we are still a long way here from anything like an embryonic version of the modern state.5 In other words, they simply weren’t states in von Ihering’s sense of the term; and even if they had been, it makes little sense to define a state simply in terms of sovereignty. Recall the example of the Natchez of Louisiana, whose Great Sun wielded absolute power within his own (rather small) Great Village, where he could order summary executions and appropriate goods pretty much as he had a mind to, but whose subjects largely ignored him when he wasn’t around. The divine kingship of the Shilluk, a Nilotic people of East Africa, worked on similar lines: there were very few limits on what the king could do to those in his physical presence, but there was also nothing remotely resembling an administrative apparatus to translate his sovereign power into something more stable or extensive: no tax system, no system to enforce royal orders, or even report on whether or not they had been obeyed.
也没有任何令人信服的证据表明古代美索不达米亚,即使是由皇室王朝统治的城市,也实现了任何程度的真正的领土主权,所以我们在这里离任何类似现代国家的雏形还有一段距离。5换句话说,它们根本就不是冯·伊赫林意义上的国家;即使它们是国家,单纯以主权来定义国家也没有什么意义。回顾路易斯安那州纳奇兹人的例子,他们的大太阳在自己的(相当小的)大村子里拥有绝对的权力,在那里他可以下令即决处决,也可以随心所欲地占有货物,但当他不在的时候,他们的臣民基本上不理会他。东非尼罗河流域的 Shilluk 人的神权也是如此:国王对他所管辖的人几乎没有任何限制,但也没有任何类似于行政机构的东西来将他的主权权力转化为更稳定或更广泛的东西:没有税收制度,没有执行皇家命令的制度,甚至没有报告这些命令是否被遵守。
As we can now begin to see, modern states are, in fact, an amalgam of elements that happen to have come together at a certain point in human history – and, arguably, are now in the process of coming apart again (consider, for instance, how we currently have planetary bureaucracies, such as the WTO or IMF, with no corresponding principle of global sovereignty). When historians, philosophers or political scientists argue about the origin of the state in ancient Peru or China, what they are really doing is projecting that rather unusual constellation of elements backwards: typically, by trying to find a moment when something like sovereign power came together with something like an administrative system (the competitive political field is usually considered somewhat optional). What interests them is precisely how and why these elements came together in the first place.
正如我们现在开始看到的那样,现代国家实际上是各种元素的混合体,这些元素碰巧在人类历史的某个时刻聚集在一起 —— 而且可以说,现在正处于再次分离的过程中(例如,考虑一下我们目前如何拥有诸如世贸组织或国际货币基金组织这样的全球官僚机构,而没有相应的全球主权原则)。当历史学家、哲学家或政治学家争论国家在古代秘鲁或中国的起源时,他们所做的实际上是将这种相当不寻常的元素组合向后投射:通常是试图找到一个类似主权权力的东西与类似行政系统的东西结合的时刻(竞争性的政治领域通常被认为有些可有可无)。他们感兴趣的是,这些元素首先是如何以及为什么走到一起的。
For instance, a standard story of human political evolution told by earlier generations of scholars was that states arose from the need to manage complex irrigation systems, or perhaps just large concentrations of people and information. This gave rise to top-down power, which in turn came to be tempered, eventually, by democratic institutions. That would imply a sequence of development somewhat like this:
例如,前几代学者讲述的人类政治演变的一个标准故事是,国家的产生是由于需要管理复杂的灌溉系统,或者也许只是人员和信息的大量集中。这就产生了自上而下的权力,而这种权力最终又受到民主制度的约束。这就意味着发展的顺序有点像这样:
Administration → Sovereignty → (eventually) Charismatic Politics
行政管理 → 主权 → (最终)魅力政治
As we showed in Chapter Eight, contemporary evidence from ancient Eurasia now points to a different pattern, where urban administrative systems inspire a cultural counter-reaction (a further example of schismogenesis), in the form of squabbling highland princedoms (‘barbarians’, from the perspective of the city dwellers),6 which eventually leads to some of those princes establishing themselves in cities and systematizing their power:
正如我们在第八章中所展示的那样,来自古代欧亚大陆的当代证据现在指出了一种不同的模式,即城市行政系统激发了一种文化上的反作用(这是分裂发生的另一个例子),其形式是争吵不休的高原王族(从城市居民的角度来看,是 “野蛮人”)。6这最终导致其中一些王公在城市中建立自己的势力并使其系统化:
Administration → Charismatic Politics → Sovereignty (by schismogenesis)
行政管理 → 魅力政治 → 主权(通过分裂发生)
This may well have happened in some cases – Mesopotamia, for example – but it seems unlikely to be the only way in which such developments might culminate in something that (to us at least) resembles a state. In other places and times – often in moments of crisis – the process may begin with the elevation to pre-eminent roles of charismatic individuals who inspire their followers to make a radical break with the past. Eventually, such figureheads assume a kind of absolute, cosmic authority, which is finally translated into a system of bureaucratic roles and offices.7 The path then might look more like this:
在某些情况下 —— 例如美索不达米亚 —— 这很可能已经发生,但这似乎不太可能是这种发展最终形成(至少对我们来说)类似于国家的唯一方式。在其他地方和时代 —— 通常是在危机时刻 —— 这一过程可能始于将有魅力的个人提升到卓越的地位,激励其追随者与过去彻底决裂。最终,这些人物承担了一种绝对的、宇宙性的权威,并最终转化为一个官僚角色和办公室的系统。7那时的道路可能看起来更像这样:
Charismatic vision → Sovereignty → Administration
魅力的愿景 → 主权 → 行政管理
What we are challenging here is not any particular formulation, but the underlying teleology. All these accounts seem to assume that there is only one possible end point to this process: that these various types of domination were somehow bound to come together, sooner or later, in something like the particular form taken by modern nation states in America and France at the end of the eighteenth century, a form which was gradually imposed on the rest of the world after both world wars.
我们在这里挑战的不是任何特定的表述,而是基本的目的论。所有这些说法似乎都假定,这个过程只有一个可能的终点:这些不同类型的统治在某种程度上注定要聚集在一起,迟早会形成类似于 18 世纪末美洲和法国的现代民族国家所采取的特殊形式,这种形式在两次世界大战后逐渐强加给世界其他地区。
What if this wasn’t true?
如果这不是真的呢?
What we are going to do here is to see what happens if we approach the history of some of the world’s first kingdoms and empires without any such preconceptions. Along with the origins of the state, we will also be putting aside such similarly vague and teleological notions as the ‘birth of civilization’ or the ‘rise of social complexity’ in order to take a closer look at what actually happened. How did large-scale forms of domination first emerge, and what did they actually look like? What, if anything, do they have to do with arrangements that endure to this day?
我们在这里要做的是,看看如果我们在没有任何这样的先入之见的情况下接近一些世界上最早的王国和帝国的历史会发生什么。除了国家的起源,我们还将抛开类似于 “文明的诞生” 或 “社会复杂性的兴起” 这样模糊和目的论的概念,以便仔细研究实际发生的情况。大规模的统治形式最初是如何出现的,它们到底是什么样子的?如果有的话,它们与持续到今天的安排有什么关系?
Let’s start by examining those few cases in the pre-Columbian Americas which even the greatest sticklers for definition tend to agree were ‘states’ of some kind.
让我们先研究一下哥伦布之前的美洲的那几个案例,即使是对定义最执着的人也倾向于同意它们是某种 “国家”。
The general consensus is that there were only two unambiguous ‘states’ in the Americas at the time of the Spanish conquest: the Aztecs and the Inca. Of course, that is not how the Spanish would have referred to them. Hernán Cortés, in his letters and communications, wrote of cities, kingdoms and occasionally republics. He hesitated to refer to the Aztec ruler, Moctezuma, as an ‘emperor’ – presumably so as not to risk ruffling the feathers of his own lord, the ‘most Catholic emperor Charles V’. But it would never have occurred to him to ponder whether any of these kingdoms or cities qualified as ‘states’, since the concept barely existed at the time. Nonetheless, this is the question which has preoccupied modern scholars, so let us consider each of these polities in turn.
普遍的共识是,在西班牙征服时,美洲只有两个明确的 “国家”:阿兹特克人和印加人。当然,这并不是西班牙人对他们的称呼。埃尔南·科尔特斯在他的信件和通讯中写到了城市、王国,偶尔也有共和国。他对把阿兹特克人的统治者莫克特苏马称为 “皇帝” 犹豫不决 —— 大概是为了不冒冒失失地激怒他自己的主子 “最虔诚的天主教皇帝查理五世”。但他从未想过这些王国或城市是否有资格成为 “国家”,因为这一概念在当时几乎不存在。尽管如此,这个问题却一直困扰着现代学者,所以让我们依次考虑这些政体。
We will begin with an anecdote, recorded in a Spanish source not long after the conquista, about the raising of children in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, shortly before it fell to Spanish forces: ‘at birth boys were given a shield with four arrows. The midwife prayed that they might be courageous warriors. They were presented four times to the sun and told of the uncertainties of life and the need to go to war. Girls, on the other hand, were given spindles and shuttles as a symbol of their future dedication to homely tasks.’8 It is hard to say how widespread this practice was, but it points to something fundamental in Aztec society. Women still occupied important positions in Tenochtitlan as merchants, doctors and priestesses; but they were excluded from an ascendant class of aristocrats whose power was based on warfare, predation and tribute. How far back this erosion of female political power went among the Aztecs is unclear (certain lines of evidence, such as the obligation for high-ranking advisors at court to take on the cultic role of Cihuacóatl – or ‘Snake Woman’ – suggest not far at all). What we do know is that masculinity, often expressed through sexual violence, became part of the dynamics of imperial expansion.9 Indeed, the rape and enslavement of conquered women were among the primary grievances reported to Cortés and his men by Aztec subjects in Veracruz,10 who by 1519 were willing to take their chances with a band of unknown Spanish freebooters.
我们将从一则轶事开始,这则轶事记录在征服后不久的西班牙资料中,是关于阿兹特克人的首都特诺奇蒂特兰在落入西班牙军队手中前不久的儿童抚养情况。“男孩出生时,会得到一个带有四支箭的盾牌。助产士祈祷他们能成为勇敢的战士。他们被四次献给太阳,并被告知生活的不确定性和去打仗的必要性。另一方面,女孩则被赠予纺锤和梭子,以象征她们未来对家务的奉献。8很难说这种做法有多普遍,但它指出了阿兹特克社会的一些基本情况。在特诺奇蒂特兰,妇女作为商人、医生和女祭司仍然占据着重要的;但她们被排除在贵族的上升阶级之外,其权力是建立在战争、掠夺和进贡的基础上。在阿兹特克人中,女性政治权力的侵蚀有多远还不清楚(某些证据,如宫廷中的高级顾问有义务承担 Cihuacóatl —— 或 “蛇女” —— 的崇拜角色,表明离得不远)。我们所知道的是,经常通过性暴力表现出来的阳刚之气,成为帝国扩张的动力的一部分。9事实上,强奸和奴役被征服的妇女是韦拉克鲁斯的阿兹特克人向科尔特斯和他的手下报告的主要不满之一。10到 1519 年,他们愿意与一伙不知名的西班牙自由盗贼一起冒险。
Male nobility among the Aztecs or Mexica seem to have viewed life as an eternal contest, or even conquest – a cultural tendency which they traced back to their origins as an itinerant community of warriors and colonizers. Theirs seems to have been a ‘capturing society’ not unlike some of the other, more recent Amerindian societies we’ve explored, but on an infinitely greater scale. Enemies taken in war were kept, nurtured to ensure their vitality – sometimes in luxurious circumstances – but then finally killed by ritual specialists to repay a primordial debt of life to the gods, and presumably for any number of other reasons too. At Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor the result was a veritable industry of pious bloodletting, which some Spanish observers took as clear proof that the Aztec ruling classes were in league with Satan.11
阿兹特克人或墨西哥人中的男性贵族似乎把生活看作是一场永恒的竞赛,甚至是征服 —— 他们的这种文化倾向可以追溯到他们作为战士和殖民者的流动社区的起源。他们似乎是一个 “俘虏社会”,与我们探讨过的其他一些较新的美洲印第安人社会不一样,但规模却大得多。在战争中被俘虏的敌人被保留下来,被培养以确保他们的生命力 —— 有时是在奢华的环境中 —— 但最后被仪式专家杀死,以偿还对神灵的原始生命之债,也可能是出于任何其他原因。在特诺奇蒂特兰的 Templo Mayor,结果是一个名副其实的虔诚的放血行业,一些西班牙观察家认为这清楚地证明了阿兹特克人的统治阶级与撒旦是同伙。11
This is how the Aztecs attempted to impress their neighbours, and it is still how they impress themselves on the human imagination today: the image of thousands of prisoners, waiting in line to have their hearts torn out by masked god-impersonators, is, admittedly, difficult to get out of one’s head. In other respects, however, the sixteenth-century Aztecs seemed to the Spaniards to present a rather familiar picture of human government; certainly, more familiar than anything they encountered in the Caribbean or in the swamps and savannahs of Yucatán. Monarchy, ranks of officialdom, military cadres and organized religion (however ‘demonic’) were all highly developed. Urban planning in the Valley of Mexico, as some Spaniards remarked, seemed superior to what was found in their Castilian cities back home. Sumptuary laws, no less elaborate than in Spain, kept a respectable distance between governing and governed, dictating everything from fashion to sexual mores. Tribute and taxation were overseen by calpixque who, appointed from among the ranks of commoners, were unable to turn their knowledge of administration into political power (a preserve of noblemen and warriors). In the conquered territories local nobles were kept in place, obedience being assured by a patronage system that tied them to sponsors at the Aztec court. Here too the Spaniards found resonance with their practice of aeque principali, which granted autonomy to newly acquired territories so long as their local headmen supplied annual tithes to the Crown.12
这就是阿兹特克人试图给他们的邻居留下的印象,也是他们今天给人类想象力留下的印象:成千上万的囚犯排着队等着被戴着面具的神的代言人挖出心脏的形象,诚然,很难从人们的头脑中消失。然而,在其他方面,十六世纪的阿兹特克人对西班牙人来说似乎是一幅相当熟悉的人类政府图景;当然,比他们在加勒比海或尤卡坦的沼泽地和大草原上遇到的任何东西都要熟悉。君主制、官员队伍、军事干部和有组织的宗教(无论多么 “恶魔化”)都是高度发达的。正如一些西班牙人所说,墨西哥谷地的城市规划,似乎比他们在家乡卡斯蒂利亚的城市中发现的要好。奢华的法律,不亚于西班牙,在统治者和被统治者之间保持着可敬的距离,规定了从时尚到性的一切。贡品和税收由卡尔皮克监督,他从平民中任命,无法将其管理知识转化为政治权力(这是贵族和战士的专利)。在被征服的领土上,当地的贵族们被保留了下来,他们的服从是由赞助制度保证的,该制度将他们与阿兹特克宫廷的赞助人联系在一起。西班牙人在这里也找到了与他们的 aeque principali 做法的共鸣,即只要当地的头人每年向王室提供什一税,就给予新获得的领土以自治权。12
Like the Spanish Habsburgs, who became their overlords, the Aztec warrior aristocracy had risen from relatively humble origins to create one of the world’s largest empires. Even their Triple Alliance paled, however, when compared with what the conquistadors found in the Peruvian Andes.
就像成为其霸主的西班牙哈布斯堡王朝一样,阿兹特克战士贵族从相对卑微的起源中崛起,创造了世界上最大的帝国之一。然而,与征服者在秘鲁安第斯山脉发现的东西相比,即使是他们的三国联盟也显得微不足道。
In Spain, as in much of Eurasia, mountains offered refuge from the coercive power of kings and emperors; rebels, bandits and heretics hid out in the highlands. But in Inca Peru, everything seemed to work the other way round. Mountains formed the backbone of imperial power. This upside-down (to European eyes) political world, conceived atop the Andean Cordillera, was the super-kingdom of Tawantinsuyu, meaning ‘quarters closely bound’.13
在西班牙,就像在欧亚大陆的大部分地区一样,山区为国王和皇帝的强制力提供了庇护;叛乱者、土匪和异教徒则躲藏在高地。但在秘鲁印加,一切似乎都是反过来的。山脉构成了帝国权力的支柱。这个颠倒的(在欧洲人看来)政治世界,在安第斯山脉的科迪勒拉山顶上构思,是一个超级王国 Tawantinsuyu,意思是 “紧密相连的四分之一”。13
More precisely, Tawantinsuyu refers to the four suyus or major administrative units of the Sapa Inca’s domain. From their capital at Cuzco, where it was said even grass was made of gold, Inca of royal blood extracted periodic mit’a – a rotating labour tribute, or corvée – from some millions of subjects distributed across the western littoral of South America, from Quito to Santiago.14 Exercising a degree of sovereignty over eighty contiguous provinces and countless ethnic groups, by the end of the fifteenth century the Inca had achieved something like the ‘universal monarchy’ (monarchia universalis) that the Habsburgs, rulers of numerous scattered territories, could only conjure in their dreams. Nevertheless, if Tawantinsuyu is to be considered a state, it was still very much a state in formation.
更准确地说,Tawantinsuyu 指的是萨帕印加领地的四个 suyus 或主要行政单位。从他们的首都库斯科(据说那里连草都是金子做的),具有王室血统的印加人从分布在南美西海岸,从基多到圣地亚哥的大约数百万臣民那里定期收取 Mit'a —— 一种轮流的劳动贡品,或称徭役。14到 15 世纪末,印加人对 80 个毗连的省份和无数的民族行使了一定程度的主权,实现了类似于 “普遍君主制”(monarchia universalis)的目标,而哈布斯堡王朝是众多分散领土的统治者,他们只能在梦中想象这种情况。然而,如果塔万廷苏尤被认为是一个国家,它在很大程度上仍然是一个正在形成的国家。
Just as the popular image of the Aztecs turns on mass carnage, popular images of the Inca tend to portray them as master administrators: as we’ve seen, Enlightenment thinkers like Madame de Graffigny and her readers formed their first impression of what a welfare state, or even state socialism, might be like by contemplating accounts of the empire in the Andes. In reality, Inca efficiency was decidedly uneven. The empire, after all, was over 2,500 miles long. In villages at any appreciable distance from Cuzco, Chan Chan or other centres of royal power, the imperial apparatus made, at best, a sporadic appearance and many villages remained largely self-governing. Chroniclers and officials like Juan Polo de Ondegardo y Zárate were intrigued to discover that while typical Andean villages did indeed have a complex administrative apparatus, that apparatus appeared to be entirely home-grown, based on collective associations called ayllu . In order to accommodate imperial demands for tribute or corvée labour, local communities had merely tweaked these collectives slightly.15
正如阿兹特克人的流行形象转向大规模屠杀一样,印加人的流行形象也倾向于把他们描绘成管理大师:正如我们所看到的,像格拉菲尼夫人这样的启蒙思想家和她的读者通过思考安第斯山脉的帝国的描述,形成了他们对福利国家,甚至国家社会主义可能是什么样的第一印象。在现实中,印加帝国的效率显然是不均衡的。毕竟,这个帝国有 2500 多英里长。在距离库斯科、昌昌或其他皇室权力中心相当远的村庄,帝国机器充其量只是零星出现,许多村庄基本上保持自治。像 Juan Polo de Ondegardo y Zárate 这样的编年史家和官员很感兴趣地发现,虽然典型的安第斯村庄确实有一个复杂的行政机构,但这个机构似乎完全是自生的,基于被称为 ayllu 的集体协会。为了满足帝国对贡品或徭役的要求,当地社区只是对这些集体进行了一些调整。15
The imperial centre of the Inca Empire forms a stark contrast with that of the Aztec. Moctezuma, despite his grandeur (his palace contained everything from an aviary to quarters for troupes of comic dwarfs), was officially just the tlatoani or ‘first speaker’ in a council of aristocrats, and his empire officially a Triple Alliance of three cities. For all the bloodthirsty spectacle, the Aztec Empire was really a confederation of noble families. Indeed, the spectacle itself seems to have been at least partly rooted in the same spirit of aristocratic one-upmanship that spurred Aztec nobles to compete in public ball games, or for that matter philosophical debate. The Inca, in contrast, insisted their sovereign was himself the incarnate Sun. All authority derived from a single point of radiance – the person of Sapa Inca (Unique Inca) himself – cascading downwards through ranks of royal siblings. The Inca court was an incubator, a hothouse for sovereignty. Compressed within its walls were not only the household of the living king and his sister, who was also his Coya (queen), but also the administrative heads, chief priests and imperial guard of the kingdom, most of them blood relatives of the king.
印加帝国的帝国中心与阿兹特克的帝国中心形成了鲜明的对比。莫克特苏马,尽管他很宏伟(他的宫殿里有从鸟巢到喜剧侏儒群的所有东西),但在官方看来,他只是贵族会议中的特拉托尼或 “第一发言人”,他的帝国正式成为三个城市的三重联盟。对于所有嗜血的场面,阿兹特克帝国实际上是一个贵族家庭的联盟。事实上,这种场面本身似乎至少有一部分是源于贵族的单挑精神,这种精神促使阿兹特克贵族在公共球赛中竞争,或者在哲学辩论中竞争。相反,印加人坚持认为他们的君主本身就是太阳的化身。所有的权力都来自于一个单一的光芒点 —— Sapa Inca(独特的印加人)本人 —— 通过王室兄弟姐妹层层向下传递。印加宫廷是一个孵化器,是主权的温床。墙内不仅有在世的国王和他的妹妹(也是他的王后)的家庭,还有王国的行政首长、首席牧师和御林军,他们大多是国王的亲属。
Being a god, the Sapa Inca never really died. The bodies of former kings were preserved, wrapped and mummified, much like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt; like the pharaohs, too, they held court from beyond the grave, receiving regular offerings of food and clothing from their former rural estates – though unlike the mummified bodies of Egyptian pharaohs, which at least remained confined to their tombs, their Peruvian equivalents were wheeled out to attend public events and sponsored festivals.16 (One reason why each new ruler was obliged to expand the empire was precisely this: they only inherited the old ruler’s army. His court, lands and retainers remained in the dead Inca’s hands.) This extraordinary concentration of power around the Inca’s own body had a flip side: royal authority was extremely difficult to delegate.
作为一个神,萨帕印加人从未真正死去。前任国王的尸体被保存起来,包裹起来,做成木乃伊,就像古埃及的法老一样;也像法老一样,他们在坟墓之外开庭,定期接受来自他们以前的农村庄园的食物和衣服的供奉 —— 尽管与埃及法老的木乃伊尸体不同,他们至少还被限制在他们的坟墓里,他们在秘鲁的同类人被推出来参加公共活动和赞助节日。16(每位新统治者都必须扩大帝国的原因之一正是如此:他们只继承了老统治者的军队。他的宫廷、土地和家臣仍然在死去的印加人手中。)这种围绕印加人自己的权力的非凡集中有一个反面:皇室权力极难下放。
The most important officials were ‘honorary Inca’ who, while not directly related to the sovereign, were allowed to wear the same ear ornaments and were otherwise seen as an extension of his personage. Statue doubles or other substitutes might also be employed – there was an elaborate ritual protocol surrounding these – but to do anything important, the Sapa Inca’s personal presence was required, meaning the court was continually on the move, with the royal person being regularly carried through the ‘four quarters’ in a litter lined with silver and feathers. This, as much as the need to carry armies and supplies, required enormous investment in road systems, converting one of the world’s most complex and rugged terrains into a continuous network of well-maintained highways and stepped paths, punctuated by shrines (huacas) and way stations, stocked and staffed from the royal coffers.17 It was on one such annual tour, far from the walls of Cuzco, that the last Sapa Inca, Atahualpa, was abducted by Pizarro’s men and subsequently killed.
最重要的官员是 “名誉印加”,他们虽然与君主没有直接关系,但可以佩戴同样的耳饰,并被视为君主身份的延伸。雕像替身或其他替代者也可能被雇用 —— 围绕这些雕像有一个精心设计的仪式协议 —— 但要做任何重要的事情,都需要萨帕印加亲自出面,这意味着宫廷不断地在移动,王室成员经常被放在一个铺有银色和羽毛的轿子里穿过 “四分之一”。这和运送军队和物资的需要一样,需要对道路系统进行巨大的投资,将世界上最复杂、最崎岖的地形之一变成一个由维护良好的公路和阶梯小路组成的连续网络,并以神龛(huacas)和驿站为点缀,由皇室国库提供物资和人员。17正是在这样一次远离库斯科城墙的年度旅行中,最后一位萨帕印加人阿塔瓦尔帕被皮萨罗的人绑架,随后被杀害。
As with the Aztecs, consolidation of the Inca’s empire seems to have involved a great deal of sexual violence, and resulting changes in gender roles. In this case, what began as a customary system of marriage became a template for class domination. Traditionally, in those parts of the Andes where people were divided by social rank, women were expected to marry into families of higher status than their own. In doing so the bride’s lineage was said to be ‘conquered’ by the groom’s. What began as a kind of ritual figure of speech seems to have been turned into something more literal and systematic. In each newly conquered territory, the Inca immediately built a temple and forced a quota of local virgins to become ‘Brides of the Sun’: women cut off from their families, kept either as permanent virgins or dedicated to the Sapa Inca, for him to exploit and dispose of as he pleased. In consequence, the king’s subjects could be referred to collectively as ‘conquered women’,18 and local nobles jockeyed for position by trying to place their daughters in prominent roles at court.
与阿兹特克人一样,印加帝国的巩固似乎涉及大量的性暴力,以及由此产生的性别角色的变化。在这种情况下,起初的习惯性婚姻制度成为阶级统治的模板。传统上,在安第斯山脉那些按社会等级划分的地方,妇女要嫁到比自己地位高的家庭。这样一来,新娘的血统就被新郎的血统所 “征服” 了。开始时只是一种仪式性的言语,后来似乎变成了更多的字面意思和系统性的东西。 在每一块新征服的领土上,印加人都会立即建造一座寺庙,并强迫当地一定数量的处女成为 “太阳的新娘”:这些妇女被从她们的家庭中分离出来,要么作为永久的处女,要么献给萨帕印加人,供他随意利用和处置。因此,国王的臣民可以被统称为 “被征服的女人”。18当地贵族为了争夺地位,试图将他们的女儿安排在宫廷的重要位置上。
What, then, of the famous Inca administrative system? It did, certainly, exist. Records were kept largely in the form of knotted strings called khipu (or quipu), described in Pedro Cieza de León’s Crónica del Perú (1553):
那么,著名的印加行政系统是什么呢?当然,它确实存在。记录主要以结绳的形式保存,称为 khipu(或 quipu),在佩德罗·西萨·德·莱昂(Pedro Cieza de León)的 Crónica del Perú(1553)中有所描述:
In each provincial center they had accountants who were called ‘knot- keepers/orderers’ [khipukamayuqs], and by means of these knots they kept the record and account of what had been given in tribute by those [people] in that district, from the silver, gold, clothing, herd animals, to the wool and other things down to the smallest items, and by the same knots they commissioned a record of what was given over one year, or ten or twenty years and they kept the accounts so well that they did not lose a pair of sandals.19
在每个省的中心,他们都有会计,他们被称为 “绳结管理人/管理员”khipukamayuqs,通过这些绳结,他们记录和核算该地区那些人进贡的东西,从银、金、衣服、畜群、羊毛和其他东西,直到最小的物品,通过同样的绳结,他们委托记录一年、十年或二十年的进贡情况,他们把账目记得如此清楚,以至于他们没有丢失一双凉鞋。19
Spanish chroniclers provided few details, however, and after the use of khipu was officially banned in 1583, local specialists had little incentive to commit their lore to writing. We don’t know exactly how it worked, although new sources of information are still emerging from remote Andean communities, where it turns out Inca-style khipus and their associated forms of knowledge were kept in use until much more recent times.20 Scholars argue about whether khipu should be considered a form of writing. What sources we do have mainly describe the numerical system, noting the hierarchical arrangement of colour-coded knots into decimal units, from 1 to 10,000; but it seems the most elaborate string bundles encoded records of topography and genealogy, and most likely also narratives and songs.21
然而,西班牙编年史家提供的细节很少,而且在 1583 年正式禁止使用 khipu(奇普)后,当地专家没有什么动力把他们的传说写下来。我们不知道它到底是如何运作的,尽管新的信息来源仍然从偏远的安第斯社区出现,事实证明印加风格的奇普和其相关的知识形式一直被保留到更近的时代。20学者们对奇普是否应被视为一种写作形式争论不休。我们所掌握的资料主要描述了数字系统,注意到将彩色编码的绳结分层排列成小数单位,从 1 到 10,000;但似乎最精致的绳捆绑是对地形和家谱的记录,而且很可能还有叙事和歌曲。21
In many ways, these two great polities – Aztec and Inca – were ideal targets for conquest. Both were organized around easily identifiable capitals, inhabited by easily identifiable kings who could be captured or killed, and surrounded by peoples who were either long accustomed to obeying orders or, if they had any inclination to shrug off power from the centre, were likely to do so precisely by joining forces with would-be conquistadors. If an empire is based largely on military force, it is relatively easy for a superior force of the same kind to seize control of its territory, since if one takes control of that centre – as Cortés did by laying siege to Tenochtitlan in 1521, or Pizarro by seizing Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532 – everything else falls readily into place. There might be stubborn resistance (the siege of Tenochtitlan took over a year of gruelling house-to-house fighting) but, once it was over, the conquerors could take over many of the mechanisms of rule that already existed and start conveying orders to subjects schooled in obedience.
在许多方面,这两个伟大的政体 —— 阿兹特克和印加 —— 是理想的征服目标。两者都是围绕着容易识别的首都组织起来的,居住着容易识别的国王,他们可以被俘虏或被杀死,周围的人民要么长期习惯于服从命令,要么,如果他们有任何甩掉中央权力的倾向,很可能正是通过与未来的征服者联手。如果一个帝国主要以军事力量为基础,那么同类的优势力量就比较容易夺取其领土的控制权,因为如果一个人控制了这个中心 —— 就像科尔特斯在 1521 年围攻特诺奇蒂特兰那样,或者皮萨罗在 1532 年夺取卡哈马卡的阿塔瓦尔帕那样 —— 其他一切就很容易到位了。可能会有顽强的抵抗(围攻特诺奇蒂特兰花了一年多的时间,挨家挨户地进行艰苦的战斗),但一旦结束,征服者就可以接管许多已经存在的统治机制,并开始向接受过服从教育的国民传达命令。
Where there are no such powerful kingdoms – either because they had never existed, as in much of North America or Amazonia, or because a population had consciously rejected central government – things could get decidedly trickier.
在没有这种强大的王国的地方 —— 要么是因为它们从未存在过,如北美或亚马逊的大部分地区,要么是因为人们有意识地拒绝中央政府 —— 事情会变得明显棘手。
A good example of such decentralization is the territory inhabited by speakers of the various Maya languages: the Yucatán Peninsula and the highlands of Guatemala and Chiapas to its south.22 At the time of the initial Spanish incursion, the region was divided into what seemed to the settlers an endless succession of tiny principalities, townships, villages and seasonal hamlets. Conquest was a long and laborious business, and no sooner was it completed (or at least, no sooner had the Spanish decided it was completed),23 than the new authorities faced an apparently endless series of popular revolts.
这种权力下放的一个很好的例子是讲各种玛雅语言的人所居住的地区:尤卡坦半岛和其南部的危地马拉和恰帕斯高地。22在西班牙人最初入侵时,该地区被划分为在定居者看来是一连串的小公国、乡镇、村庄和季节性小村庄。征服是一项漫长而费力的工作,而且在征服完成之前(或者至少在西班牙人决定完成之前)。23新政府就面临着一连串显然是无休止的人民起义。
As early as 1546, a coalition of Maya rebels rose up against Spanish settlers and, despite brutal reprisals, resistance never really died down. Prophetic movements brought a second major wave of insurrections in the eighteenth century; and in 1848, a mass rising almost drove the settlers’ descendants out of Yucatán entirely, until the siege of their capital, at Mérida, was interrupted by the planting season. The resulting ‘Caste War’, as it was called, continued for generations. There were still rebels holding out in parts of Quintana Roo at the time of the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century; indeed, you could argue that the same rebellion continues, in another form, with the Zapatista movement that controls large parts of Chiapas today. As the Zapatistas also show, it was in these territories, where no major state or empire had existed for centuries, that women came most prominently to the fore in anti-colonial struggles, both as organizers of armed resistance and as defenders of indigenous tradition.
早在 1546 年,玛雅反叛者联盟就起来反对西班牙定居者,尽管遭到残酷的报复,但抵抗从未真正消停。预言运动在 18 世纪带来了第二波重大的叛乱;1848 年,一场大规模的起义几乎将定居者的后代完全赶出了尤卡坦,直到对其首都梅里达的围攻被种植季节打断。由此产生的被称为 “种姓战争” 的战争持续了好几代。二十世纪第二个十年墨西哥革命时,金塔纳罗奥州的部分地区仍有叛乱分子在坚持;事实上,你可以说,同样的叛乱以另一种形式继续存在,今天控制恰帕斯州大部分地区的萨帕塔运动。正如萨帕塔运动所显示的那样,正是在这些几个世纪以来没有大国或帝国存在的领土上,妇女在反殖民斗争中最为突出,她们既是武装抵抗的组织者,又是土著传统的捍卫者。
Now, this anti-authoritarian streak might come as something of a surprise to those who know the Maya as one of a triumvirate of New World civilizations – Aztecs, Maya, Inca – familiar from books on art history. Much of the art from what’s called the Classic Maya period, roughly AD 150–900, is exquisitely beautiful. Most derives from cities that once existed in what are now the tangled rainforests of Petén. On first appraisal, the Maya in this period seem to have been organized into kingdoms much like those of the Andes or central Mexico, only smaller; but then our picture, until quite recently, was dominated by sculpted monuments and glyphic inscriptions commissioned by the ruling elites themselves.24 These focus, predictably enough, on the deeds of great rulers (holders of the title ajaw), especially their conquests, as alliances of independent city-states vied for hegemony over the lowlands under the leadership of two rival dynasties – those of Tikal and the ‘snake kings’ of Calakmul.25
现在,对于那些知道玛雅是新世界文明三巨头之一 —— 阿兹特克人、玛雅人、印加人 —— 从艺术史书籍中熟悉的人来说,这种反权威的倾向可能会让他们感到有些惊讶。所谓的玛雅古典时期(大约在公元 150-900 年)的许多艺术作品都是非常精美的。大多数来自曾经存在于现在佩滕省纠结的雨林中的城市。乍一看,这一时期的玛雅人似乎已被组织成很像安第斯山脉或墨西哥中部的王国,只是规模较小;但直到最近,我们的画面还被统治精英们自己委托雕刻的纪念碑和石刻碑文所主导。24可以预见的是,这些碑文的重点是伟大的统治者(“ajaw” 头衔的持有者)的事迹,特别是他们的征服,因为独立的城邦联盟在两个对立的王朝 —— 提卡尔王朝和卡拉克穆尔的 “蛇王” 的领导下争夺低地的霸权。25
These monuments tell us a great deal about the rituals such rulers conducted to commune with their divinized ancestors26 – but precious little about what ordinary life was like for their subjects, let alone how those subjects felt about their rulers’ claims to cosmic power. If there were prophetic movements or periodic insurrections during the Classic Maya period, as there were in the colonial period, we would currently have few ways to know about them; although archaeological research may yet change this picture. What we do know is that, in the final centuries of the Classic period, women attain a new visibility in sculpture and inscription, appearing not just as consorts, princesses and queen mothers but also as powerful rulers and spirit mediums in their own right. We also know that at some point in the ninth century the Classic Maya political system came apart, and most of the great cities were abandoned.
这些纪念碑告诉我们很多关于这些统治者为与他们的神化祖先交流而举行的仪式的情况26 —— 但关于他们的臣民的普通生活是什么样子的,我们却知之甚少,更不用说这些臣民对他们的统治者的宇宙权力要求有什么看法了。如果在古典玛雅时期有预言运动或定期叛乱,就像在殖民时期一样,我们目前几乎没有办法了解它们;尽管考古研究可能会改变这种情况。我们所知道的是,在古典时期的最后几个世纪,妇女在雕塑和铭文中获得了新的知名度,不仅作为妃子、公主和王母出现,而且还作为强大的统治者和精神媒介出现。我们还知道,在第九世纪的某个时刻,古典玛雅的政治体系分崩离析,大部分的大城市被遗弃。
Archaeologists argue about what happened. Some theories assume that popular resistance – some combination of defection, mass movements or outright rebellion – must have played a part, even if most are understandably reluctant to draw too firm a line between cause and consequence.27 It is significant that one of the few urban societies which endured, even grew, was located in the northern lowlands around the city of Chichén Itza. Here, kingship seems to have dramatically changed its character, becoming a more purely ceremonial or even theatrical affair – so hedged about by ritual that any serious political intervention was no longer possible – while day-to-day governance apparently passed largely into the hands of a coalition that formed among collectives of prominent warriors and priests.28 Indeed, some of what were once assumed to be royal palaces in this ‘Post-Classic’ period are now being reinterpreted as assembly halls (popolna) for local representatives.29
考古学家们对所发生的事情争论不休。一些理论认为,民众的抵抗 —— 叛变、群众运动或彻底的反叛 —— 肯定起到了一定的作用,尽管大多数人不愿意在原因和,但也可以理解。27重要的是,为数不多的经久不衰、甚至不断发展的城市社会之一,位于奇琴伊察市周围的北部低地。在这里,王权似乎已经极大地改变了它的性质,成为一个更纯粹的仪式,甚至是戏剧性的事件 —— 被仪式所掩盖,任何严肃的政治干预都不再可能 —— 而日常的治理显然主要是由杰出的战士和祭司集体组成的联盟来负责。28事实上,在这个 “后古典主义” 时期,一些曾经被认为是皇室的宫殿现在被重新解释为地方代表的集会厅(popolna)。29
By the time the Spaniards arrived, six centuries after the collapse of cities in Petén, Mayan societies were thoroughly decentralized, parsed into a bewildering variety of townships and principalities, many without kings.30 The books of Chilam Balam, prophetic annals written down in the late sixteenth century, dwell endlessly on the disasters and miseries that befall oppressive rulers. In other words, there’s every reason to believe that the spirit of rebellion which has marked this particular region can be traced back to at least the time of Charlemagne (the eighth century AD ); and that across the centuries, overbearing Maya rulers were quite regularly and repeatedly disposed of.
当西班牙人到达时,在佩滕的城市崩溃的六个世纪之后,玛雅人的社会已经彻底分散了,被分割成各种令人困惑的乡镇和公国,其中许多没有国王。30 Chilam Balam 的书,即 16 世纪末写下的预言性年鉴,无休止地讲述了压迫性统治者所遭遇的灾难和不幸。换句话说,我们完全有理由相信,标志着这个特殊地区的反叛精神至少可以追溯到查理曼大帝时代(公元 8 世纪);而且在几个世纪中,霸道的玛雅统治者被经常和反复地处理掉。
Undoubtedly, the Classic Maya artistic tradition is magnificent, one of the greatest the world has ever seen. By comparison, artistic products from the ‘Post-Classic’ – as the period from roughly AD 900 to 1520 is known – often seem clumsy and less worthy of appreciation. On the other hand, how many of us would really prefer to live under the arbitrary power of a petty warlord who, for all his patronage of fine arts, counts tearing the hearts out of living human bodies among his most significant accomplishments? Of course, history is not usually thought about in such terms, and it is worth asking why. Part of the reason is simply the designation ‘Post-Classic’, which suggests little more than an afterthought. It may seem a trivial issue – but it matters, because such habits of thought are one reason why periods of relative freedom and equality tend to get sidelined in the larger sweep of history.
毋庸置疑,古典玛雅艺术传统是宏伟的,是世界上有史以来最伟大的艺术之一。相比之下,“后古典时期” —— 大约从公元 900 年到 1520 年这一时期 —— 的艺术产品往往显得笨拙,不值得欣赏。另一方面,我们中有多少人真的愿意生活在一个小军阀的专横权力之下,而这个军阀虽然对艺术有赞助,但他最重要的成就之一是把活人的心脏挖出来?当然,人们通常不会以这种方式来思考历史,这值得问一问原因。部分原因是 “后古典主义” 这一名称,它意味着只是一种事后的考虑。这似乎是一个微不足道的问题 —— 但它很重要,因为这种思维习惯是相对自由和平等的时期往往在更大的历史范围内被搁置的原因之一。
This is important: let’s look at it further, before we return to our three forms of domination.
这一点很重要:在我们回到我们的三种统治形式之前,让我们进一步看看它。
History and archaeology abound with terms like ‘post’ and ‘proto’, ‘intermediate’ or even ‘terminal’. To some degree, these are products of early-twentieth-century cultural theory. Alfred Kroeber, a pre-eminent anthropologist of his day, spent decades on a research project aimed at determining if identifiable laws lie behind the rhythms and patterns of cultural growth and decay: whether systematic relations could be established between artistic fashions, economic booms and busts, periods of intellectual creativity and conservatism, and the expansion and collapse of empires. It was an intriguing question but, after many years, his ultimate conclusion was: no, there were no such laws. In his Configurations of Cultural Growth (1944) Kroeber examined the relation of the arts, philosophy, science and population across human history and found no evidence for any consistent pattern; nor has any such pattern been successfully discerned in those few more recent studies which continue to plough the same furrow.32
历史和考古学中充斥着 “后” 和 “原”、“中间” 甚至 “终端” 这样的术语。在某种程度上,这些都是二十世纪早期文化理论的产物。阿尔弗雷德·克罗伯(Alfred Kroeber)是当时杰出的人类学家,他花了几十年时间进行研究,旨在确定文化增长和衰落的节奏和模式背后是否存在可识别的规律:是否可以在艺术时尚、经济繁荣和萧条、知识创新和保守主义时期以及帝国的扩张和崩溃之间建立系统关系。这是一个耐人寻味的问题,但多年之后,他的最终结论是:不,不存在这样的规律。在他的《文化增长的配置》(1944 年)中,克罗伯研究了人类历史上艺术、哲学、科学和人口的关系,没有发现任何一致模式的证据;在那些继续耕耘同一领域的少数最近的研究中,也没有成功地发现任何这样的模式。32
Despite this, when we write about the past today we almost invariably organize our thinking as if such patterns really did exist. Civilizations are typically represented either as flower-like – growing, blooming and then shrivelling up – or else as like some grand building, painstakingly constructed but prone to sudden ‘collapse’. The latter term tends to be used indiscriminately for situations like the Classic Maya collapse, which did indeed involve a rapid abandonment of some hundreds of settlements and the disappearance of millions of people; but equally it’s used for the ‘collapse’ of the Egyptian Old Kingdom, where the only thing that really seems to have declined precipitously is the power of Egypt’s elites ruling from the northern city of Memphis.
尽管如此,当我们今天写到过去时,我们几乎无一例外地组织我们的思维,仿佛这种模式真的存在。文明通常被表现为像花一样 —— 成长、绽放,然后枯萎 —— 或者像一些宏伟的建筑,费尽心思建造,但容易突然 “崩溃”。后者往往被不加区分地用于像古典玛雅人的崩溃,这确实涉及到数百个定居点的迅速放弃和数百万人的消失;但同样它也被用于埃及旧王国的 “崩溃”,其中唯一真正看起来已经急剧下降的是埃及的精英们在北部城市孟菲斯的统治权力。
Even in the Maya case, to describe the entire period between AD 900 and 1520 as ‘Post-Classic’ is to suggest that the only really significant thing about it is the degree to which it can be seen as the waning of a Golden Age. In a similar way, terms like ‘Proto-palatial Crete’, ‘Predynastic Egypt’ or ‘Formative Peru’ convey a sense of impatience, as if Minoans, Egyptians or Andean peoples spent centuries doing little but laying the groundwork for such a Golden Age – and, it is implied, for strong, stable government – to come about.33 We’ve already seen how this played out in Uruk, where at least seven centuries of collective self-rule (also termed ‘Predynastic’ in earlier scholarship) comes to be written off as a mere prelude to the ‘real’ history of Mesopotamia – which is then presented as a history of conquerors, dynasts, lawgivers and kings.
即使在玛雅的情况下,将公元 900 年至 1520 年之间的整个时期描述为 “后古典主义”,也是在暗示,它唯一真正有意义的,就是它可以被视为黄金时代的衰落程度。同样,像 “原皇室克里特岛”、“前王朝埃及” 或 “形成期秘鲁” 这样的术语传达了一种不耐烦的感觉,好像米诺斯人、埃及人或安第斯人花了几个世纪的时间,除了为这样一个黄金时代的到来奠定基础外,还暗示了强大、稳定的政府的到来。33我们已经看到这一点在乌鲁克的表现,在那里,至少有七个世纪的集体自治(在早期的学术研究中也被称为 “前王朝”)被写成美索不达米亚 “真正” 历史的前奏 —— 然后被表述为一部征服者、王朝、立法者和国王的历史。
Some periods are dismissed as prefaces, others as postfaces. Still others become ‘intermediary’. The ancient Andes and Mesoamerica are cases in point, but probably the most familiar – and the most striking – example is again that of Egypt. Museumgoers will no doubt be familiar with the division of ancient Egyptian history into Old, Middle and New Kingdoms. Each is separated by an ‘intermediate’ period, often described as epochs of ‘chaos and cultural degeneration’. In fact, these were simply periods when there was no single ruler of Egypt. Authority devolved to local factions or, as we will shortly see, changed its nature altogether. Taken together, these intermediate periods span about a third of Egypt’s ancient history, down to the accession of a series of foreign or vassal kings (known simply as the Late period), and they saw some very significant political developments of their own.
有些时期被斥为前言,有些则被斥为后言。还有一些成为 “中介”。古安第斯山脉和中美洲就是这样的例子,但最熟悉的 —— 也是最引人注目的 —— 可能还是埃及的例子。博物馆的观众无疑会对古埃及历史分为旧王国、中王国和新王国的做法感到熟悉。每一时期之间都有一个 “中间” 时期,通常被描述为 “混乱和文化退化” 的时代。事实上,这些时期只是埃及没有单一统治者的时期。权力移交给地方派别,或者,正如我们很快会看到的,完全改变了其性质。总的来说,这些中间时期跨越了埃及古代历史的三分之一,直到一系列外国国王或附庸国王的登基(简单地称为晚期),它们见证了自己的一些非常重要的政治发展。
To take just one example, at Thebes between 754 and 525 BC – spanning the Third Intermediate and Late periods – a series of five unmarried, childless princesses (of Libyan and Nubian descent) were elevated to the position of ‘god’s wife of Amun’, a title and role which acquired not just supreme religious, but also great economic and political weight at this time. In official representations, these women are given ‘throne names’ framed by cartouches, just like kings, and appear leading royal festivals and making offerings to the gods.34 They also owned some of the richest estates in Egypt, including extensive lands and a large staff of priests and scribes. To have a situation in which women not only command power on such a scale, but in which this power is linked to an office reserved explicitly for single women, is historically unusual. Yet this political innovation is little discussed, partly because it is already framed within an ‘intermediate’ or ‘late’ period that signals its transitory (or even decadent) nature.35
仅举一例,在公元前 754 年至 525 年间的底比斯 —— 横跨第三中间期和晚期 —— 有五位未婚、无子女的公主(利比亚和努比亚后裔)被提升为 “阿蒙神的妻子”,这一称号和角色在此时不仅获得了最高的宗教地位,而且还获得了巨大的经济和政治影响力。在官方的表述中,这些妇女被赋予了 “王位名称”,并以刻字为框架,就像国王一样,她们出现在皇家节日中,并向神灵供奉。34她们还拥有埃及最富有的一些财产,包括广阔的土地和大量的祭司和文士队伍。在这种情况下,妇女不仅拥有如此规模的权力,而且这种权力与明确为单身妇女保留的职位相联系,这在历史上是不寻常的。然而,这种政治创新却很少被讨论,部分原因是它已经被框定在一个 “中间” 或 “晚期” 时期,表明其过渡性(甚至是颓废性)的性质。35
One might assume the division into Old, Middle and New Kingdoms is itself very ancient, perhaps going back thousands of years to Greek sources like the third-century BCAegyptiaca, composed by Egyptian chronicler Manetho, or even to the hieroglyphic records themselves. Not so. In fact, the tripartite division only began to be proposed by modern Egyptologists in the late nineteenth century, and the terms they introduced (initially ‘Reich’ or ‘empire’, later ‘kingdom’) were explicitly modelled on European nation states. German, particularly Prussian, scholars played a leading role here. Their tendency to perceive ancient Egypt’s past as a series of cyclical alternations between unity and disintegration clearly echoes the political concerns of Bismarck’s Germany, where an authoritarian government was trying to assemble a unified nation state from an endless variety of tiny statelets. After the First World War, as Europe’s own regime of old monarchies was coming apart, prominent Egyptologists such as Adolf Erman granted the ‘Intermediate’ periods their own place in history, drawing comparisons between the end of the Old Kingdom and the Bolshevik Revolution of their own time.36
人们可能会认为旧王国、中王国和新王国的划分本身就非常古老,也许可以追溯到几千年前的希腊资料,如埃及编年史家马内托所写的《圣经》(BCegyptiaca),甚至是象形文字记录本身。并非如此。事实上,现代埃及学家在 19 世纪末才开始提出三分法,而他们提出的术语(最初是 “帝国” 或 “帝国”,后来是 “王国”)是明确仿效欧洲民族国家的。德国,特别是普鲁士的学者们在这里发挥了主导作用。他们把古埃及的历史看作是一系列统一与解体之间的循环交替,这显然与俾斯麦的德国的政治关切相呼应,当时的专制政府正试图从无尽的小国中组建一个统一的民族国家。第一次世界大战后,当欧洲自己的旧君主制政权分崩离析时,著名的埃及学家如阿道夫·埃尔曼赋予了 “中间” 时期自己的历史地位,将旧王国的结束与他们那个时代的布尔什维克革命相比较。36
With hindsight, it’s easy to see just how much these chronological schemes reflect their authors’ political concerns. Or even, perhaps, a tendency – when casting their minds back in time – to imagine themselves either as part of the ruling elite, or as having roles somewhat analogous to ones they had in their own societies: the Egyptian or Maya equivalents of museum curators, professors and middle-range functionaries. But why, then, have these schemes become effectively canonical?
事后看来,我们很容易看到这些时间安排在多大程度上反映了作者的政治关切。甚至,也许是一种倾向 —— 当他们的思想回到过去的时候 —— 把自己想象成统治精英的一部分,或者想象成与他们在自己社会中的角色有些类似的角色:相当于博物馆馆长、教授和中层官员的埃及或玛雅人的角色。但是,为什么这些计划已经成为有效的典范?
Consider the Middle Kingdom (2055–1650 BC ), represented in standard histories as a time when Egypt moved from the supposed chaos of the First Intermediate period into a renewed phase of strong and stable government, bringing with it an artistic and literary renaissance.37 Even if we set aside the question of just how chaotic the ‘intermediate period’ really was (we’ll get to that soon), the Middle Kingdom could equally well be represented as a period of violent disputes over royal succession, crippling taxation, state-sponsored suppression of ethnic minorities, and the growth of forced labour to support royal mining expeditions and construction projects – not to mention the brutal plundering of Egypt’s southern neighbours for slaves and gold. However much future Egyptologists would come to appreciate them, the elegance of Middle Kingdom literature like The Story of Sinuhe and the proliferation of Osiris cults likely offered little solace to the thousands of military conscripts, forced labourers and persecuted minorities of the time, many of whose grandparents were living quite peaceful lives in the preceding ‘dark ages’.
考虑到中王国(公元前 2055-1650 年),在标准的历史中,埃及从所谓的第一中间时期的混乱中进入了一个强大和稳定的政府的新阶段,带来了艺术和文学的复兴。37即使我们撇开 “中间时期” 到底有多混乱的问题不谈(我们很快就会讨论这个问题),中世纪王国也同样可以被描述为一个围绕着王室继承权的暴力争端、残暴的税收、国家支持的对少数民族的镇压,以及支持皇家采矿探险和建筑项目的强迫劳动的增长,更不用说对埃及南部邻国的奴隶和黄金的残酷掠夺了。无论未来的埃及学家如何欣赏它们,像《西努赫的故事》这样优雅的中世纪文学作品和奥西里斯崇拜的扩散,很可能没有给当时成千上万的应征士兵、强迫劳动者和受迫害的少数民族带来什么安慰,他们中的许多人的祖辈在之前的 “黑暗时代” 过着相当和平的生活。
What is true of time, incidentally, is also true of space. For the last 5,000 years of human history – i.e. roughly the span of time we will be moving around in, over the course of this chapter – our conventional vision of world history is a chequerboard of cities, empires and kingdoms; but in fact, for most of this period these were exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants, if visible at all to historians’ eyes, are variously described as ‘tribal confederacies’, ‘amphictyonies’ or (if you’re an anthropologist) ‘segmentary societies’ – that is, people who systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority. We know a bit about how such societies worked in parts of Africa, North America, Central or Southeast Asia and other regions where such loose and flexible political associations existed into recent times, but we know frustratingly little of how they operated in periods when these were by far the world’s most common forms of government.
顺带一提,时间是真的,空间也是真的。在过去 5000 年的人类历史中 —— 也就是说,在本章中,我们将大致在这个时间跨度中移动。我们对世界历史的传统看法是一个由城市、帝国和王国组成的棋盘。但事实上,在这一时期的大部分时间里,这些都是政治等级制度的特殊岛屿,被更大的领土所包围,其居民,如果在历史学家眼里是可见的,则被不同程度地描述为 “部落联盟”、“两栖国家” 或(如果你是人类学家)“分割社会” —— 也就是说,人们系统地避免了固定的、总体性的权威系统。我们对这种社会在非洲、北美、中亚或东南亚以及其他地区如何运作有一些了解,在这些地区,这种松散和灵活的政治联合体一直存在到近代,但我们对他们在迄今为止是世界上最常见的政府形式的时期如何运作了解得很少,令人沮丧。
A truly radical account, perhaps, would retell human history from the perspective of the times and places in between. In that sense, this chapter is not truly radical: for the most part, we are telling the same old story; but we are at least trying to see what happens when we drop the teleological habit of thought, which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states. We are considering, instead, the possibility that – when looking at those times and places usually taken to mark ‘the birth of the state’ – we may in fact be seeing how very different kinds of power crystallize, each with its own peculiar mix of violence, knowledge and charisma: our three elementary forms of domination.
一个真正激进的叙述,也许会从中间的时间和地点的角度来重述人类历史。从这个意义上说,这一章并不是真正的激进:在大多数情况下,我们讲述的是同样的老故事;但我们至少在试图看看,当我们放弃目的论的思维习惯时,会发生什么,因为这种思维习惯使我们在古代世界寻找我们现代民族国家的雏形。相反,我们正在考虑这样一种可能性 —— 在审视那些通常被视为 “国家诞生” 的时间和地点时,我们实际上可能看到非常不同类型的权力是如何形成的,每一种都有其自身特有的暴力、知识和魅力的组合:我们的三种基本的统治形式。
One way to test the value of a new approach is to see if it helps us explain what had previously seemed anomalous cases: that is, ancient polities which undeniably mobilized and organized enormous numbers of people, but which don’t seem to fit any of the usual definitions of a state. Certainly, there are plenty of these. Let’s start with the Olmec, generally seen as the first great Mesoamerican civilization.
检验一种新方法的价值的方法之一是看它是否能帮助我们,解释那些以前看起来很反常的案例:即那些不可否认地动员和组织了大量人口的古代政体,但它们似乎并不符合国家的任何常规定义。当然,这样的例子有很多。让我们从奥尔梅克开始,它通常被视为第一个伟大的中美洲文明。
How precisely to describe the Olmec has proved a difficult problem for archaeologists to grapple with. Early-twentieth-century scholars referred to them as an artistic or cultural ‘horizon’, largely because it wasn’t clear how else to describe a style – easily identifiable by certain common types of pottery, anthropomorphic figurines and stone sculpture – that seemed to pop up between 1500 and 1000 BC across an enormous area, straddling the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and including Guatemala, Honduras and much of southern Mexico, but whose meaning was otherwise uncertain. Whatever the Olmec were, they seemed to represent the ‘mother culture’, as it came to be known, of all later Mesoamerican civilizations, having invented the region’s characteristic calendar systems, glyphic writing and even ball games.38
事实证明,如何准确地描述奥尔梅克人是考古学家要解决的一个难题。二十世纪早期的学者将他们称为艺术或文化的 “地平线”,主要是因为不清楚如何描述一种风格 —— 通过某些常见类型的陶器、拟人俑和石雕可以轻易识别 —— 这种风格似乎在公元前 1500 年至 1000 年之间出现在一个巨大的地区,跨越特万特佩克地峡,包括危地马拉、洪都拉斯和墨西哥南部的大部分地区,但其含义却不确定。不管奥尔梅克人是什么,他们似乎代表了后来所有中美洲文明的 “母文化”,因为他们发明了该地区特有的日历系统、石刻文字甚至是球类运动。38
At the same time, there was no reason to assume the Olmec were a unified ethnic or even political group. There was much speculation about wandering missionaries, trading empires, elite fashion styles and much else besides. Eventually, archaeologists came to understand that there was, in fact, an Olmec heartland in the marshlands of Veracruz, where the swamp cities of San Lorenzo and La Venta arose along the fringes of Mexico’s Gulf Coast. The internal structure of these Olmec cities is still poorly understood. Most seem to have been centred on ceremonial precincts – of uncertain layout, but including large earthen pyramid mounds – surrounded by extensive suburbs. These monumental epicentres stand in relative isolation, amid an otherwise fragmented and relatively unstructured landscape of small maize-farming settlements and seasonal forager camps.39
同时,没有理由认为奥尔梅克人是一个统一的民族甚至政治团体。人们对流浪的传教士、贸易帝国、精英的时尚风格以及其他许多方面都有很多猜测。最终,考古学家了解到,事实上,在韦拉克鲁斯州的沼泽地有一个奥尔梅克的中心地带,那里沿着墨西哥湾海岸的边缘出现了圣洛伦索和拉文塔的沼泽城市。这些奥尔梅克城市的内部结构仍然不甚明了。大多数城市似乎都是以祭祀区为中心 —— 布局不确定,但包括大型土质金字塔丘 —— 被广泛的郊区包围。这些纪念性的中心站在相对孤立的地方,在一个由小型玉米种植定居点和季节性觅食者营地组成的零散和相对无序的景观中。39
What can we really say, then, about the structure of Olmec society? We know it was in no sense egalitarian; there were clearly marked elites. The pyramids and other monuments suggest that, at least at certain times of year, these elites had extraordinary resources of skill and labour at their disposal. In every other respect, though, ties between centre and hinterland appear to have been surprisingly superficial. The collapse of the first great Olmec city at San Lorenzo, for instance, seems to have had very little impact on the wider regional economy.40
那么,关于奥尔梅克社会的结构,我们到底能说些什么?我们知道它在任何意义上都不是平均主义的;有明显标记的的精英。金字塔和其他纪念碑表明,至少在一年中的某些时候,这些精英们拥有非凡的技能和劳动力资源供他们使用。但在其他方面,中心和腹地之间的联系似乎出奇的肤浅。例如,位于圣洛伦索的第一个伟大的奥尔梅克城市的崩溃,似乎对更广泛的区域经济影响甚微。40
Any further assessment of Olmec political structure has to reckon with what many consider its signature achievement: a series of absolutely colossal sculpted heads. These remarkable objects are free-standing, carved from tons of basalt, and of a quality comparable with the finest ancient Egyptian stonework. Each must have taken untold hours of grinding to produce. These sculptures appear to be representations of Olmec leaders, but, intriguingly, they are depicted wearing the leather helmets of ball players. All the known examples are sufficiently similar that each seems to reflect some kind of standard ideal of male beauty; but, at the same time, each is also different enough to be seen as a unique portrait of a particular, individual champion.41
对奥尔梅克政治结构的任何进一步评估都必须考虑到许多人认为其标志性的成就:一系列绝对巨大的雕塑头像。这些非凡的物品是独立的,由成吨的玄武岩雕刻而成,其质量可与最好的古埃及石器相比。每一个都是经过无数个小时的打磨才完成的。这些雕塑似乎是奥尔梅克领导人的代表,但耐人寻味的是,他们被描绘成戴着球手的皮头盔。所有已知的例子都足够相似,以至于每个人似乎都反映了某种标准的男性美感;但同时,每个人也足够不同,可以被看作是一个特定的、个人的冠军的独特肖像。41
No doubt there were also actual ball-courts – though these have proved surprisingly elusive in the archaeological record – and while we obviously don’t know what kind of game was played, if they were anything like later Maya and Aztec ball games it likely took place in a long and narrow court, with two teams from high-ranking families competing for fame and honour by striking a heavy rubber ball with the hips and buttocks. It seems both reasonable and logical to conclude that there was a fairly direct relationship between competitive games and the rise of an Olmec aristocracy.42 Without written evidence it’s hard to say much more, but looking a bit closer at later Mesoamerican ball games might at least give us a sense of how this worked in practice.
毫无疑问,当时也有真正的球场 —— 尽管这些球场在考古记录中被证明是出人意料的 —— 虽然我们显然不知道当时玩的是什么游戏,但如果它们与后来的玛雅和阿兹特克球赛一样,很可能是在一个狭长的球场上进行的,来自高级家族的两支队伍通过用臀部和臀部击打沉重的橡胶球来竞争名声和荣誉。似乎可以合理和合乎逻辑地得出结论,竞技游戏和奥尔梅克贵族的崛起之间存在着相当直接的关系。42由于没有书面证据,我们很难说得更多,但仔细研究一下后来的中美洲球类运动,至少可以让我们了解这种运动的实际情况。
Stone ball-courts were common features of Classic Maya cities, alongside royal residences and pyramid-temples. Some were purely ceremonial; others were actually used for sport. The chief Maya gods were themselves ball players. In the K’iche Maya epic Popol Vuh a ball game provides the setting in which mortal heroes and underworld gods collide, leading to the birth of the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who go on to beat the gods at their own deadly game and ascend to take their own place among the stars.
石制球场是古典玛雅城市的常见特征,与皇家住宅和金字塔寺庙并列。有些纯粹是仪式性的,有些则是实际用于运动。玛雅的主要神灵本身就是球手。在 K'iche 玛雅史诗《Popol Vuh》中,一场球赛为凡人英雄和冥界诸神的碰撞提供了背景,导致英雄双胞胎 Hunahpu 和 Xbalanque 的诞生,他们在自己的致命游戏中击败了诸神,并在星空中占据自己的位置。
The fact that the greatest known Maya epic centres on a ball game gives us a sense of how central the sport was to Maya notions of charisma and authority. So too, in a more visceral way, does an inscribed staircase built at Yaxchilán to mark the accession (in AD 752) of what was probably its most famous king, known as Bird Jaguar the Great. On the central block he appears as a ball player. Flanked by two dwarf attendants, the king prepares to strike a huge rubber ball containing the body of a human captive – bound, broken and bundled – as it tumbles down a flight of stairs. Capturing high-ranking enemies to be held for ransom or, failing payment, to be killed at ball games was a major objective of Maya warfare. This particular unfortunate figure may be a certain Jewelled Skull, a noble from a rival city, whose humiliation was so important to Bird Jaguar that he also made it the central feature of a carved lintel on a nearby temple.43
最著名的玛雅史诗以一场球赛为中心,这一事实让我们感受到这项运动对玛雅人的魅力和权威观念是多么重要。同样,以一种更直观的方式,在亚克斯奇兰建造的一个刻字楼梯也是为了纪念可能是其最著名的国王(被称为 “大鸟美洲虎”)的登基(公元 752 年)。在中央区块上,他以一个球手的形象出现。在两个矮人侍从的簇拥下,国王准备击打一个巨大的橡胶球,里面装着一个人类俘虏的尸体 —— 被捆绑的、破碎的和捆绑的 —— 当它从楼梯上滚落时。俘虏高级敌人以获取赎金,或者在无法支付赎金的情况下,在球赛中被杀死,这是玛雅战争的一个主要目标。这个特别不幸的人物可能是某个珠宝头骨,一个来自敌对城市的贵族,他的羞辱对鸟居士来说是如此重要,以至于他还把它作为附近寺庙上的一个雕刻门楣的核心特征。43
In some parts of the Americas, competitive sports served as a substitute for war. Among the Classic Maya, one was really an extension of the other. Battles and games formed part of an annual cycle of royal competitions, played for life and death. Both are recorded on Maya monuments as key events in the lives of rulers. Most likely, these elite games were also mass spectacles, cultivating a particular sort of urban public – the sort that relishes gladiatorial contests, and thereby comes to understand politics in terms of opposition. Centuries later, Spanish conquistadors described Aztec versions of the ball game played at Tenochtitlan, where players confronted each other amid racks of human skulls. They reported how reckless commoners, carried away in the competitive fervour of the tournament, would sometimes lose all they had or even gamble themselves into slavery.44 The stakes were so high that, should a player actually send a ball through one of the stone hoops adorning the side of the court (these were made so small as to render it nearly impossible; normally the game was won in other ways), the contest ended immediately, and the player who performed the miracle received all the goods wagered, as well as any others he might care to pillage from the onlookers.45
在美洲的一些地方,竞技体育可以代替战争。在古典玛雅人中,其中一个确实是另一个的延伸。战斗和游戏构成了皇家竞赛的年度周期的一部分,为生命和死亡而战。两者都被记录在玛雅纪念碑上,作为统治者生活中的关键事件。最有可能的是,这些精英游戏也是群众性的表演,培养了一种特殊的城市公众 —— 那种喜欢角斗士比赛的人,从而在反对方面理解政治。几个世纪后,西班牙征服者描述了阿兹特克人在特诺奇蒂特兰进行的球赛,球员们在人头骨架上互相对峙着。他们报告说,鲁莽的平民在比赛的竞争热潮中被冲昏了头脑,有时会失去他们的所有财产,甚至把自己赌成奴隶。44赌注是如此之高,以至于如果一个选手真的把球送进了装饰在球场边上的一个石圈(这些石圈做得非常小,几乎不可能;通常比赛是通过其他方式赢得的),比赛立即结束,创造奇迹的选手获得了所有下注的物品,以及他可能想从围观者那里掠夺的任何其他物品。45
It is easy to see why the Olmec, with their intense fusion of political competition and organized spectacle, are nowadays seen as cultural progenitors of later Mesoamerican kingdoms and empires; but there is little evidence that the Olmec themselves ever created an infrastructure for dominating a large population. So far as anyone knows, their rulers did not command a stable military or administrative apparatus that might have allowed them to extend their power throughout a wider hinterland. Instead, they presided over a remarkable spread of cultural influence radiating from ceremonial centres, which may only have been densely occupied on specific occasions (such as ritual ball games) scheduled in concert with the demands of the agricultural calendar, and largely empty at other times of year.
很容易理解为什么奥尔梅克人以其政治竞争和有组织的奇观的强烈融合,如今被视为后来中美洲王国和帝国的文化;但几乎没有证据表明奥尔梅克人自己曾经创造了一个统治大量人口的基础设施。到目前为止,他们的统治者并没有掌握一个稳定的军事或行政机构,这可能使他们的权力扩展到更广阔的腹地。相反,他们主持了一个从仪式中心辐射出来的文化影响的显著传播,这些中心可能只在与农业日历要求一致的特定场合(如仪式性的球赛)才被密集地占用,而在一年中的其他时间则基本上是空的。
In other words, if these were ‘states’ in any sense at all, then they are probably best defined as seasonal versions of what Clifford Geertz once called ‘theatre states’, where organized power was realized only periodically, in grand but fleeting spectacles. Anything we might consider ‘statecraft’, from diplomacy to the stockpiling of resources, existed in order to facilitate the rituals, rather than the other way round.46
换句话说,如果这些是任何意义上的 “国家”,那么它们可能最好被定义为克利福德·格尔茨(Clifford Geertz)曾经称之为 “戏剧国家” 的季节性版本,在那里,有组织的权力只是定期实现,在盛大但转瞬即逝的场面上。任何我们可能认为是 “国家技术” 的东西,从外交到资源储备,都是为了促进仪式而存在,而不是相反。46
In South America we find a somewhat analogous situation. Before the Inca, a whole series of other societies are identified tentatively by scholars as ‘states’ or ‘empires’. All these societies occur within the area later controlled by the Inca: the Peruvian Andes and adjacent coastal drainages. None used writing, at least in any form we can recognize. Still, from AD 600 onwards many did employ knotted strings for record-keeping, and probably other forms of notation too.
在南美洲,我们发现了一个有点类似的情况。在印加人之前,有一系列其他社会被学者们暂时认定为 “国家” 或 “帝国”。所有这些社会都出现在后来被印加人控制的地区:秘鲁安第斯山脉和邻近的沿海河道。没有一个人使用文字,至少在我们可以识别的任何形式下。不过,从公元 600 年起,许多人确实使用打结的绳索来做记录,可能还有其他形式的记号。
Monumental centres of some kind were already appearing in the Rio Supe region in the third millennium BC .47 Later, between 1000 and 200 BC, a single centre – at Chavín de Huántar, in the northern highlands of Peru – extended its influence over a much larger area.48 This ‘Chavín horizon’ gave way to three distinct regional cultures. In the central highlands arose a militarized polity known as Wari. In parallel, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, a metropolis called Tiwanaku – at 420 hectares, roughly twice the size of Uruk or Mohenjo-daro – took form, using an ingenious system of raised fields to grow its crops on the freezing heights of the Bolivian altiplano .49 On the north coast of Peru, a third culture, known as Moche, displays striking funerary evidence of female leadership: lavish tombs of warrior-priestesses and queens, drenched in gold and flanked by human sacrifices.50
公元前三千年,在里约苏佩地区已经出现了某种类型的纪念碑中心。47后来,在公元前 1000 年至公元前 200 年之间,一个单一的中心 —— 位于秘鲁北部高地的 Chavín de Huántar —— 将其影响扩大到更大的区域。48这个 “Chavín 地平线” 让位于三个不同的区域文化。在中部高地出现了一个被称为瓦里的军事化政体。与此同时,在的的喀喀湖畔,一个名为蒂瓦纳库的大都市 —— 占地 420 公顷,大约是乌鲁克或摩亨佐·达罗的两倍 —— 形成了,利用巧妙的高架田系统,在玻利维亚高原的冰冷高地上种植农作物。49在秘鲁的北海岸,第三种文化,即莫切文化,显示了女性领导的惊人的葬礼证据:女战士牧师和女王的豪华墓穴,金光闪闪,两边是人的祭品。50
The first Europeans to study these civilizations, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assumed that any city or set of cities with monumental art and architecture, exerting its ‘influence’ over a surrounding region, must be the capitals of states or empires (they also assumed – just as wrongly, it turns out – that all the rulers were male). As with the Olmec, a surprisingly large proportion of that influence seems to have come in the form of images – distributed, in the Andean case, on small ceramic vessels, objects of personal adornment and textiles – rather than in the spread of administrative, military or commercial institutions and their associated technologies.
在 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初,第一批研究这些文明的欧洲人认为,任何具有纪念性艺术和建筑的城市或城市群,对周围地区施加 “影响”,一定是国家或帝国的首都(他们还认为 —— 事实证明,同样错误的是 —— 所有的统治者都是男性)。与奥尔梅克人一样,这种影响的很大一部分似乎是以图像的形式出现的 —— 在安第斯的情况下,分布在小型陶瓷器皿、个人装饰品和纺织品上,而不是行政、军事或商业机构及其相关技术的传播。
Consider Chavín de Huántar itself, located high in the Mosna valley of the Peruvian Andes. Archaeologists once believed it to have been the core of a pre-Inca empire in the first millennium BC : a state controlling a hinterland that stretched to the Amazonian rainforest to the east and the Pacific Coast to the west, and included all the intervening highlands and coastal drainages in between. Such power seemed commensurate with the scale and sophistication of Chavín’s cut-stone architecture, its unrivalled abundance of monumental sculpture, and the appearance of Chavín motifs on pottery, jewellery and textiles across the wider region. But was Chavín really some kind of ‘Rome of the Andes’?
考虑到 Chavín de Huántar 本身,它位于秘鲁安第斯山脉的 Mosna 山谷的高处。考古学家曾认为它是公元前一千年的前印加帝国的核心:一个控制腹地的国家,东至亚马逊雨林,西至太平洋海岸,并包括中间的所有高地和沿海流域。这种权力似乎与查韦恩的切割石建筑的规模和复杂程度相称,其无与伦比的大量纪念性雕塑,以及在整个地区的陶器、珠宝和纺织品上出现的查韦恩图案。但是,查韦恩真的是某种 “安第斯山脉的罗马” 吗?
In fact, little evidence has emerged since to suggest this. In order to get a sense of what might really have been going on at Chavín we must look more closely at the sort of images we’re talking about, and what they tell us about the wider importance of vision and knowledge in Chavín notions of power.
事实上,此后很少有证据表明这一点。为了了解在查韦恩可能发生的真实情况,我们必须更仔细地研究我们正在谈论的那种图像,以及它们告诉我们视觉和知识在查韦恩的权力观念中更广泛的重要性。
The art of Chavín is not made up of pictures, still less pictorial narratives – at least, not in any intuitively recognizable sense. Neither does it appear to be a pictographic writing system. This is one reason why we can be fairly certain we are not dealing with an actual empire. Real empires tend to favour styles of figural art that are both very large but also very simple, so their meaning can be easily understood by anyone they wish to impress. If an Achaemenid Persian emperor carved his likeness into the side of a mountain, he did it in such a way that anyone, even an ambassador from lands as yet unknown to him (or an antiquarian of some remote future age), would be able to recognize that it is indeed the image of a very great king.
查韦恩的艺术不是由图画组成的,更不是由图画叙述组成的 —— 至少,不是在任何直观可识别的意义上。它也不像是一个象形文字系统。这就是为什么我们可以相当肯定我们面对的不是一个真正的帝国的原因之一。真正的帝国往往倾向于采用既大又简单的形象艺术风格,这样他们希望给人留下深刻印象的人就能很容易理解其含义。如果一位阿契美尼德王朝的波斯皇帝将自己的肖像刻在一座山的侧面,他这样做是为了让任何人,甚至是来自他尚未认识的国家的大使(或某个遥远的未来时代的古物学家),都能认识到这确实是一位非常伟大的国王的形象。
Chavín images, by contrast, are not for the uninitiated. Crested eagles curl in on themselves, vanishing into a maze of ornament; human faces grow snake-like fangs, or contort into a feline grimace. No doubt other figures escape our attention altogether. Only after some study do even the most elementary forms reveal themselves to the untrained eye. With due attention, we can eventually begin to tease out recurrent images of tropical forest animals – jaguars, snakes, caimans – but just as the eye attunes to them they slip back from our field of vision, winding in and out of each other’s bodies or merging into complex patterns.51
相比之下,Chavín 的图像不适合没有经验的人。凤头鹰蜷缩在自己身上,消失在装饰品的迷宫中;人脸长出蛇一样的獠牙,或扭曲成猫科动物的狰狞面孔。毫无疑问,还有一些人物完全没有引起我们的注意。只有在经过一番研究之后,即使是最基本的形式,也会在未经训练的眼睛中显现出来。在适当的关注下,我们最终可以开始找出热带森林动物的反复出现的形象 —— 美洲虎、蛇、凯门鳄 —— 但就在眼睛适应它们的时候,它们又从我们的视野中溜走,在彼此的身体中蜿蜒,或合并成复杂的图案。51
Some of these images are described by scholars as ‘monsters’, but they have nothing in common with the simple composite figures of ancient Greek vases or Mesopotamian sculpture – centaurs, griffins and the like – or their Moche equivalents. We are in another kind of visual universe altogether. It is the realm of the shape-shifter, where no body is ever quite stable or complete, and diligent mental training is required to tease out structure from what at first seems to be visual mayhem. One reason why we can say any of this with a degree of confidence is because the arts of Chavín appear to be an early (and monumental) manifestation of a much wider Amerindian tradition, in which images are not meant to illustrate or represent, but instead serve as visual cues for extraordinary feats of memory.
其中一些图像被学者们描述为 “怪物”,但它们与古希腊花瓶或美索不达米亚雕塑中的简单综合形象 —— 半人马、狮鹫等 —— 或其莫切的对应物毫无共同之处。我们完全处于另一种视觉世界。这是一个变形金刚的领域,在这里,没有一个身体是相当稳定或完整的,需要勤奋的心理训练来从最初似乎是视觉混乱的东西中挑出结构来。我们之所以能够有把握地说这些话,是因为查文的艺术似乎是更广泛的美洲印第安人传统的早期(和不朽的)表现,在这种传统中,图像不是为了说明或代表,而是作为视觉线索来完成非凡的记忆。
Up until recent times, a great many indigenous societies were still using systems of broadly similar kinds to transmit esoteric knowledge of ritual formulae, genealogies or records of shamanic journeys to the world of chthonic spirits and animal familiars.52 In Eurasia, similar techniques were developed in the ancient ‘arts of memory’, where those trying to memorize stories, speeches, lists or similar material would each have a familiar ‘memory palace’. This consisted of a mental pathway or room in which a series of striking images could be arranged, each a cue to a particular episode, incident or name. One can only imagine what might happen if someone were to draw or carve one such set of visual cues, and a later archaeologist or art historian were to discover it, with no idea of the context, let alone what the story being memorized was actually about.
直到近代,许多土著社会仍在使用大致类似的系统,将仪式公式、族谱或萨满旅行的记录等深奥的知识传递给 chthonic 精神和动物家族的世界。52在欧亚大陆,类似的技术在古代的 “记忆艺术” 中得到了发展,那些试图记住故事、演讲、清单或类似材料的人,都有一个熟悉的 “记忆宫殿”。这包括一个心理通道或房间,其中可以安排一系列引人注目的图像,每个图像都是一个特定情节、事件或名称的线索。我们可以想象,如果有人画或,雕刻出这样一组视觉线索,而后来的考古学家或艺术史学家发现了它,却不知道其背景,更不知道所记忆的故事究竟是怎么回事,会发生什么。
In the case of Chavín, we actually can be on fairly safe ground in assuming that these images were records of shamanic journeys; not just because of the peculiar nature of the images themselves, but also because of a wealth of circumstantial evidence relating to altered states of consciousness. At Chavín itself, snuff spoons, small ornate mortars and bone pipes have been found; and among its carved images are sculpted male figures with fangs and snake headdresses holding aloft the stalk of the San Pedro cactus. This plant is the basis of Huachuma, a mescaline-based infusion still made in the region today which induces psychoactive visions. Other carved figures, all of them apparently male, are surrounded by images of vilca leaves (Anadenanthera sp. ), which contain a powerful hallucinogen. Released when the leaves are ground up and snorted, it induces a gush of mucus from the nose, as faithfully depicted on sculpted heads that line the walls of Chavín’s major temples.53
就 Chavín 而言,我们实际上可以相当安全地假设这些图像是萨满教旅行的记录;这不仅是因为图像本身的特殊性,而且还因为有大量与意识改变有关的间接证据。在 Chavín 本身,已经发现了鼻烟壶、小型装饰臼和骨管;在其雕刻的图像中,有带着獠牙和蛇形头饰的男性雕塑,高举着圣佩德罗仙人掌的茎。这种植物是 Huachuma 的基础,是一种以麦司卡林为基础的输液,至今仍在该地区制造,能引起精神上的幻觉。其他雕刻的人物,显然都是男性,周围都是维卡叶(Anadenanthera sp.)的图像,其中含有一种强大的致幻剂。当把叶子磨碎并吸食时,它就会从鼻子里喷出粘液,就像 Chavín 的主要寺庙墙壁上的头像雕塑所忠实描绘的那样。53
In fact, nothing in Chavín’s monumental landscape really seems concerned with secular government at all. There are no obvious military fortifications or administrative quarters. Almost everything, on the other hand, seems to have something to do with ritual performance and the revelation or concealment of esoteric knowledge.54 Intriguingly, this is exactly what indigenous informants were still telling Spanish soldiers and chroniclers who arrived at the site in the seventeenth century. For as long as anyone could remember, they said, Chavín had been a place of pilgrimage but also one of supernatural danger, on which the heads of important families converged from different parts of the country to seek visions and oracles: the ‘speech of the stones’. Despite initial scepticism, archaeologists have gradually come round to accepting that they were right.55
事实上,在查韦恩的纪念性景观中,没有任何东西似乎真的与世俗政府有关。没有明显的军事防御工事或行政区域。另一方面,几乎所有的东西似乎都与仪式表演以及神秘知识的揭示或隐藏有关。54耐人寻味的是,这正是土著信息员在 17 世纪到达该地时仍在告诉西班牙士兵和编年史家的内容。他们说,从人们有记忆以来,Chavín 一直是一个朝圣的地方,但也是一个有超自然危险的地方,重要家族的首领们从全国各地汇聚到这里,寻求异象和神谕:“石头的语言”。尽管最初有怀疑,但考古学家们逐渐接受了他们的观点,认为他们是对的。55
It’s not just the evidence for ritual and altered states of mind, but also the extraordinary architecture of the place. The temples at Chavín contain stone labyrinths and hanging staircases which seem designed not for communal acts of worship but for individual trials, initiations and vision quests. They imply tortuous journeys ending at narrow corridors, large enough for only a single person, beyond which lies a tiny sanctum containing a monolith, carved with dense tangles of images. The most famous such monument, a stela called ‘El Lanzón’ (‘the lance’), is a shaft of granite over thirteen feet tall, around which the Old Temple of Chavín was constructed. A well-lit replica of the stela, often assumed to represent a god who is also the axis mundi, or a central pillar connecting the polar ends of a shamanic universe, has pride of place in Peru’s Museo de la Nación; but the 3,000-year-old original still resides at the heart of a darkened maze, illuminated by thin slats, where no single viewer could ever grasp the totality of its form or meaning.56
这不仅仅是仪式和改变精神状态的证据,也是这个地方非凡的建筑。查韦恩的寺庙包含石制迷宫和悬空楼梯,似乎不是为集体的崇拜行为而设计的,而是为个人的考验、入会和愿景追求而设计的。它们意味着曲折的旅程以狭窄的走廊为终点,走廊的面积只够容纳一个人,而走廊之外是一个,里面有一块雕刻着密密麻麻图像的巨石的小圣殿。最著名的纪念碑是被称为 “El Lanzón”(“长矛”)的石碑,是一个超过 13 英尺高的花岗岩轴,查韦恩的旧庙就是围绕它建造的。这块石碑的一个光线充足的复制品,通常被认为是代表一个同时也是世界轴心的神,或者是连接萨满教宇宙两极的中心支柱,在秘鲁的国家博物馆中占据了很重要的位置;但有 3000 年历史的原作仍然位于一个黑暗的迷宫的中心,由薄板条照亮,没有一个观众能够掌握其形式或意义的全部。56
If Chavín – a remote precursor to the Inca – was an ‘empire’, it was one built on images linked to esoteric knowledge. Olmec was, on the other hand, an ‘empire’ built on spectacle, competition and the personal attributes of political leaders. Clearly, our use of the term ‘empire’ here is about as loose as it could possibly be. Neither was remotely similar to, say, the Roman or Han, or indeed the Inca and Aztec Empires. Nor do they fulfil any of the important criteria for ‘statehood’ – at least not on most standard sociological definitions (monopoly of violence, levels of administrative hierarchy, and so forth). The usual recourse is to describe such regimes instead as ‘complex chiefdoms’, but this too seems hopelessly inadequate – a shorthand way of saying, ‘looks somewhat like a state, but it isn’t one’. This tells us precisely nothing.
如果说 Chavín —— 印加的一个遥远的先驱 —— 是一个 “帝国”,那么它是一个建立在与深奥知识相关的图像上的帝国。另一方面,奥尔梅克是一个建立在奇观、竞争和政治领袖的个人属性上的 “帝国”。显然,我们在这里对 “帝国” 一词的使用是尽可能的宽松。两者都与罗马帝国或汉帝国,甚至印加帝国和阿兹特克帝国相差甚远。它们也不符合 “国家” 的任何重要标准 —— 至少不符合大多数标准的社会学定义(对暴力的垄断、行政等级的层次等等)。通常的做法是将此类政权描述为 “复杂的酋长国”,但这似乎也是无可奈何的 —— 一种简略的说法,“看起来有点像国家,但它不是国家”。这恰恰没有告诉我们什么。
What makes more sense, we suggest, is to look at these otherwise puzzling cases through the lens of our three elementary principles of domination – control of violence (or sovereignty), control of knowledge, and charismatic politics – outlined at the start of the chapter. In doing so, we can see how each stresses a particular form of domination to an exceptional degree and develops it on an unusually large scale. Let’s give it a go.
我们认为,更有意义的是,通过本章开头概述的统治的三个基本原则 —— 控制暴力(或主权)、控制知识和魅力政治 —— 的视角来看待这些本来令人困惑的案例。这样一来,我们就可以看到每一种统治形式是如何被强调到一个特殊的程度,并在一个异常大的范围内发展。让我们试一试吧。
First, in the case of Chavín, power over a large and dispersed population was clearly about retaining control over certain kinds of knowledge: something perhaps not that far removed from the idea of ‘state secrets’ found in later bureaucratic regimes, although the content was obviously very different, and there was little in the way of military force to back it up. In the Olmec tradition, power involved certain formalized ways of competing for personal recognition, in an atmosphere of play laced with risk: a prime example of a large-scale, competitive political field, but again in the absence of territorial sovereignty or an administrative apparatus. No doubt there was a certain degree of personal charisma and jockeying at Chavín; no doubt among the Olmec, too, some obtained influence by their command of arcane knowledge; but neither case gives us reason to think anyone was asserting a strong principle of sovereignty.
首先,在 Chavín 的案例中,对大量分散人口的权力显然是为了保持对某些类型知识的控制:这也许与后来官僚制度中的 “国家机密” 的想法相差不大,尽管内容显然非常不同,而且几乎没有军事力量来支持它。在奥尔梅克传统中,权力涉及某些正式的竞争方式,以获得个人的认可,在一种带有风险的游戏氛围中:这是一个大规模、竞争性政治领域的主要例子,但也是在没有领土主权或行政机构的情况下。毫无疑问,在 Chavín 存在一定程度的个人魅力和竞争;毫无疑问,在奥尔梅克人中,一些人通过掌握神秘的知识获得了影响力;但这两种情况都没有让我们有理由认为有人在宣扬强有力的主权原则。
We’ll refer to these as ‘first-order regimes’ because they seem to be organized around one of the three elementary forms of domination (knowledge-control, for Chavín; charismatic politics for Olmec), to the relative neglect of the other two. The obvious next question, then, is whether examples of the third possible variant can also be found: i.e. cases of societies which develop a principle of sovereignty (that is, grant an individual or small group a monopoly on the right to use violence with impunity), and take it to extreme lengths, without either an apparatus for controlling knowledge or any sort of competitive political field. In fact, there are quite a lot of examples. Admittedly, the existence of such a society would probably be more difficult to establish from archaeological evidence alone, but to illustrate this third variant we can turn, fortunately, to more recent Amerindian societies where written documentation is available.
我们将这些制度称为 “一阶制度”,因为它们似乎是围绕着三种基本统治形式中的一种组织起来的(查文的知识控制;奥尔梅克的魅力政治),而相对忽视了其他两种。那么,下一个明显的问题是,是否也能找到第三种可能的变体的例子:即制定主权原则(即授予个人或小团体垄断使用暴力而不受惩罚的权利),并将其发挥到极致的社会案例,既没有控制知识的机器,也没有任何形式的竞争性政治领域。事实上,有相当多的例子。诚然,这样一个社会的存在可能更难仅从考古学证据中确定,但为了说明这第三种变体,我们可以幸运地转向更近的美洲印第安人社会,那里有书面文件。
As always, we must be careful with such sources, since they are written by European observers who not only brought their own biases but tended to describe societies already enmeshed in the chaotic destruction that Europeans themselves almost invariably brought in their wake. Still, French accounts of the Natchez of southern Louisiana in the eighteenth century seem to describe exactly the sort of arrangement we are interested in. By general consent, the Natchez (who called themselves Théoloël, or ‘People of the Sun’) represent the only undisputed case of divine kingship north of the Rio Grande. Their ruler enjoyed an absolute power of command that would have satisfied a Sapa Inca or Egyptian pharaoh; but they had a minimal bureaucracy, and nothing like a competitive political field. As far as we know it has never occurred to anyone to refer to this arrangement as a ‘state’.
一如既往,我们必须谨慎对待这些资料,因为它们是由欧洲观察家撰写的,他们不仅带来了自己的偏见,而且倾向于描述已经陷入混乱破坏的社会,而欧洲人自己几乎总是带来混乱的破坏。不过,法国人在 18 世纪对路易斯安那州南部的纳奇兹人的描述似乎正是我们感兴趣的那种安排。普遍认为,纳奇兹人(他们自称 Théoloël,或 “太阳之民”)代表了格兰德河以北唯一无可争议的神权案例。他们的统治者享有绝对的指挥权,可以满足萨帕印加人或埃及法老的要求;但他们有一个最小的官僚机构,也没有类似于竞争性的政治领域。据我们所知,从来没有人想到要把这种安排称为 “国家”。
Let us turn to the work of a French Jesuit, Father Maturin Le Petit, who gave an account of the Natchez in the early eighteenth century. Le Petit found the Natchez to be nothing like the people Jesuits had encountered in what is now Canada. He was especially struck by their religious practices. These revolved around a settlement all the French sources refer to as the Great Village, which centred on two great earthen platforms separated by a plaza. On one platform was a temple; on the other a kind of palace, the house of a ruler called the Great Sun, large enough to contain up to 4,000 people, roughly the size of the entire Natchez population at the time.
让我们来看看法国耶稣会士马图林·勒佩蒂神父的作品,他在 18 世纪初对纳奇兹人进行了描述。勒佩蒂特发现纳奇兹人与耶稣会士在现在的加拿大遇到的人完全不同。他尤其对他们的宗教习俗感到震惊。这些宗教活动围绕着所有法国资料中提到的大村落而展开,大村落的中心是两个巨大的土台,由一个广场分隔。一个平台上有一座神庙;另一个平台上是一种宫殿,是一个被称为大太阳的统治者的房子,大到足以容纳 4000 人,大致相当于当时整个纳奇兹的人口规模。
The temple, in which an eternal fire burned, was dedicated to the founder of the royal dynasty. The current ruler, together with his brother (called ‘the Tattooed Serpent’) and eldest sister (‘the White Woman’), were for their own parts treated with something that seemed very much like worship. Anyone who came into their presence was expected to bow and wail, and to retreat backwards. No one, not even the king’s wives, was allowed to share a meal with him; only the most privileged could even see him eat. What this meant in practice was that members of the royal family lived out their lives largely within the confines of the Great Village itself, rarely venturing beyond.57 The king himself emerged mainly during major rituals or times of war.
这座燃烧着永恒之火的寺庙是为王室王朝的创始人而设的。现任统治者与他的兄弟(被称为 “纹身蛇”)和长姐(“白女人”)一起,因其自身的原因而受到某种似乎很像崇拜的待遇。任何来到他们面前的人都要鞠躬、哀嚎,并向后退去。没有人,甚至是国王的妻子,被允许与他一起吃饭;只有最特权的人甚至可以看到他吃饭。这意味着在实践中,王室成员主要在大村的范围内生活,很少外出。57国王本人主要在重大仪式或战争时期出现。
Le Petit and other French observers – who at the time lived under the suzerainty of Louis XIV, who of course also fancied himself a ‘Sun King’ – were quite fascinated by the parallels: as a result, they described the goings-on in the Great Village in some detail. The Natchez Great Sun might not have had the grandeur of Louis XIV, but what he lacked in that regard he appeared to make up for in terms of sheer personal power. French observers were particularly struck by the arbitrary executions of Natchez subjects, the property confiscations and the way in which, at royal funerals, court retainers would – often, apparently, quite willingly – offer themselves up to be strangled to accompany the Great Sun and his closest family members in death. Those sacrificed on such occasions consisted largely of people who were, up to that point, immediately responsible for the king’s care and his physical needs – including his wives, who were invariably commoners (the Natchez were matrilineal, so it was the White Woman’s children that succeeded to the throne). Many, according to French accounts, went to their deaths voluntarily, even joyfully. One wife remarked how she dreamed of finally being able to share a meal with her husband, in another world.
勒佩蒂和其他法国观察家 —— 他们当时生活在路易十四的统治之下,当然,路易十四也自诩为 “太阳王” —— 对这种相似之处相当着迷:因此,他们对大村的情况作了一些详细描述。纳奇兹大太阳可能没有路易十四那样的气势,但他在这方面的不足似乎在纯粹的个人权力方面得到了弥补。法国观察家对纳奇兹臣民的任意处决、财产没收以及在皇室葬礼上宫廷家臣 —— 显然常常是非常自愿的 —— 献出自己被勒死以陪伴大太阳和他最亲近的家人的方式感到特别震惊。在这种场合下牺牲的人主要是那些到那时为止立即负责照顾国王和他的身体需要的人 —— 包括他的妻子,她们无一例外都是平民(纳奇兹人是母系社会,所以继承王位的是白女人的孩子)。根据法国人的描述,许多人是自愿去死的,甚至是高兴的。一位妻子说,她梦想着最终能够与她的丈夫在另一个世界里共进晚餐。
One paradoxical outcome of these arrangements was that, for most of the year, the Great Village was largely depopulated. As noted by another observer, Father Pierre de Charlevoix, ‘The great Village of the Natchez is at present reduced to a very few Cabins. The Reason which I heard for this is that the Savages, from whom the Great Chief has the Right to take all they have, get as far away from him as they can; and therefore, many Villages of this Nation have been formed at some Distance from this.’58
这些安排的一个自相矛盾的结果是,在一年中的大部分时间里,大村庄基本上没有人居住。正如另一位观察家 Pierre de Charlevoix 神父所指出的:“纳奇兹人的大村落目前只剩下了几间小屋。我听说的原因是,野人,大酋长有权从他们那里拿走所有的东西,他们离他越远越好;因此,这个民族的许多村庄都是在离这里有些距离的地方形成的。58
Away from the Great Village, ordinary Natchez appear to have led very different lives, often showing blissful disregard for the wishes of their ostensible rulers. They conducted their own independent commercial and military ventures, and sometimes flatly refused royal commands conveyed by the Great Sun’s emissaries or relatives. Archaeological surveys of the Natchez Bluffs region bear this out, showing that the eighteenth-century ‘kingdom’ in fact comprised semi-autonomous districts, including many settlements that were both larger and wealthier in trade goods than the Great Village itself.59
在远离大村的地方,普通的纳奇兹人似乎过着非常不同的生活,常常表现出对其表面上的统治者的意愿的极度漠视。他们进行自己独立的商业和军事活动,有时还断然拒绝大太阳的使者或亲属传达的皇家命令。对纳奇兹悬崖地区的考古调查证明了这一点,表明十八世纪的 “王国” 实际上是由半自治的地区组成的,包括许多定居点,它们比大村本身更大,贸易品更丰富。59
How exactly are we to understand this situation? It might seem paradoxical – but historically such arrangements are not particularly unusual. The Great Sun was a sovereign in the classical sense of the term, which is to say he embodied a principle that was seen as higher than law. Therefore no law applied to him. This is a very common bit of cosmological reasoning that we find, in some form or another, almost anywhere from Bologna to Mbanza Congo. Just as gods (or God) are not seen as bound by morality – since only a principle existing beyond good and evil could have created good and evil to begin with – so ‘divine kings’ cannot be judged in human terms; behaving in arbitrarily violent ways to anyone around them is itself proof of their transcendent status. Yet at the same time, they are expected to be creators and enforcers of systems of justice. Such with the Natchez too. The Great Sun was said to be descended from a child of the Sun who came to earth bearing a universal code of laws, among the most prominent of which were proscriptions against theft and murder. Yet the Great Sun himself ostentatiously violated those laws on a regular basis, as if to prove his identification with a principle prior to law and, therefore, able to create it.
我们究竟该如何理解这种情况?它可能看起来很矛盾 —— 但从历史上看,这种安排并不特别不寻常。大太阳是古典意义上的君主,也就是说,他体现了一种被视为高于法律的原则。因此,没有法律适用于他。这是一个非常常见的宇宙论推理,我们在从博洛尼亚到姆班扎刚果的几乎任何地方都能找到这种推理,以某种形式。正如神(或上帝)不被视为受道德约束 —— 因为只有超越善和恶的原则才能创造出善和恶 —— 所以 “神圣的国王” 不能用人类的术语来评判;以任意的暴力方式对待他们周围的任何人,本身就证明了他们的超然地位。然而与此同时,他们被期望成为,成为正义体系的创造者和执行者。纳奇兹人也是如此。据说,大太阳是太阳之子的后裔,他带着一套普遍的法律准则来到地球,其中最突出的是禁止偷窃和谋杀。然而,大太阳本人却经常公然违反这些法律,似乎是为了证明他与法律之前的原则相一致,因此能够创造法律。
The problem with this sort of power (at least, from the sovereign’s vantage point) is that it tends to be intensely personal. It is almost impossible to delegate. The king’s sovereignty extends about as far as the king himself can walk, reach, see or be carried. Within that circle it is absolute. Outside it, it attenuates rapidly. As a result, in the absence of an administrative system (and the Natchez king had only a handful of assistants), claims to labour, tribute or obedience could, if considered odious, be simply ignored. Even the ‘absolutist’ monarchs of the Renaissance, like Henry VIII or Louis XIV, had a great deal of trouble delegating their authority – that is, convincing their subjects to treat royal representatives as deserving anything like the same deference and obedience due to the king himself. Even if one does develop an administrative apparatus (as they of course did), there is the additional problem of how to get the administrators actually to do what they’re told – and, by the same token, how to get anyone to tell you if they aren’t. As late as the 1780s, as Max Weber liked to point out, Frederick the Great of Prussia found that his repeated efforts to free the country’s serfs came to nothing because bureaucrats would simply ignore the decrees or, if challenged by his legates, insisted the words of the decree should be interpreted as saying the exact opposite of what was obviously intended.60
这种权力的问题(至少,从主权者的角度来看)是它往往是强烈的个人化的。它几乎不可能被授权。国王的主权延伸到国王自己能够行走、到达、看到或被携带的范围。在这个范围内,它是绝对的。在这个范围之外,它就会迅速减弱。因此,在没有行政系统的情况下(纳奇兹国王只有少数几个助手),对劳动、贡品或服从的要求,如果被认为是可憎的,就可以直接忽略。即使是文艺复兴时期的 “绝对主义” 君主,如亨利八世或路易十四,在授权方面也有很大的困难 —— 也就是说,要说服他们的臣民把王室代表视为应该得到与国王本人同样的尊重和服从的人。即使一个人真的建立了一个行政机构(当然他们也是这样做的),还有一个问题就是如何让行政人员真正按照他们的要求去做 —— 同样,如果他们不这样做,如何让任何人告诉你。正如马克斯·韦伯喜欢指出的那样,早在 17 世纪 80 年代,普鲁士的腓特烈大帝就发现,他为解放全国农奴所做的反复努力一无所获,因为官僚们根本无视法令,或者在他的遗属提出质疑时,坚持认为法令的内容应该被解释为与明显的意图完全相反。60
In this sense, French observers were not entirely off the mark: the Natchez court really could be considered a sort of hyper-concentrated version of Versailles. On the one hand, the Great Sun’s power in his immediate presence was even more absolute (Louis could not actually snap his fingers and order someone executed on the spot); while on the other, his ability to extend that power was even more restricted (Louis did, after all, have an administration at his disposal, though a fairly limited one compared to modern nation states). Natchez sovereignty was, effectively, bottled up. There was even a suggestion that this power, and particularly its benevolent aspect, was in some way dependent on being bottled up. According to one account, the main ritual role of the king was to seek blessings for his people – health, fertility, prosperity – from the original lawgiver, a being who in his lifetime was so terrifying and destructive that he eventually agreed to be turned into a stone statue and hidden in a temple where no one would see him.61 In a similar way, the king was sacred, and could be a conduit for such blessings, precisely insofar as he could be contained.
在这个意义上,法国观察家们并没有完全偏离目标:纳奇兹宫廷真的可以被视为一种超集中的凡尔赛宫。一方面,伟大的太阳在他面前的权力更加绝对(路易不可能真的弹指一挥间下令当场处决某人);而另一方面,他扩大权力的能力受到了更大的限制(毕竟,路易确实有一个行政机构供他支配,尽管与现代民族国家相比,这个机构相当有限)。纳奇兹的主权实际上是被束之高阁了。甚至有一种说法是,这种,特别是其仁慈的一面,在某种程度上取决于被封存起来的权力。根据一种说法,国王的主要仪式角色是为他的人民寻求祝福 —— 健康、生育、繁荣 —— 从最初的法律制定者那里,这个人在他的一生中是如此可怕和具有破坏性,以至于他最终同意变成一尊石像,藏在一个没有人看到他的地方。61以类似的方式,国王是神圣的,可以成为这种祝福的渠道,正是因为他可以被控制。
The Natchez case illustrates, with unusual clarity, a more general principle whereby the containment of kings becomes one of the keys to their ritual power. Sovereignty always represents itself as a symbolic break with the moral order; this is why kings so often commit some kind of outrage to establish themselves, massacring their brothers, marrying their sisters, desecrating the bones of their ancestors or, in some documented cases, literally standing outside their palace and gunning down random passers-by.62 Yet that very act establishes the king as potential lawmaker and high tribunal, in much the same way that ‘High Gods’ are so often represented as both throwing random bolts of lightning, and standing in judgment over the moral acts of human beings.
纳奇兹案以异常清晰的方式说明了一个更普遍的原则,即对国王的遏制成为其仪式性权力的关键之一。主权总是象征性地与道德秩序决裂;这就是为什么国王经常为建立自己而犯下某种暴行,屠杀他们的兄弟,娶他们的姐妹,亵渎他们祖先的遗骨,或者在一些有记载的案例中,真的站在他们的宫殿外,枪杀随机路人。62然而,这种行为本身就将国王确立为潜在的立法者和高级法庭,就像 “高高在上的神” 经常被描述为既能随意扔出闪电,又能对人类的道德行为进行审判一样。
People have an unfortunate tendency to see the successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine, or at least to identify it with some kind of transcendental power. We might not fall on our knees before any thug or bully who manages to wreak havoc with impunity (at least, if he isn’t actually in the room), but insofar as such a figure does manage to establish themselves as genuinely standing above the law – in other words, as sacred or set apart – another apparently universal principle kicks in: in order to keep him apart from the muck and mire of ordinary human life, that same figure becomes surrounded with restrictions. Violent men generally insist on tokens of respect, but tokens of respect taken to the cosmological level – ‘not to touch the earth’, ‘not to see the sun’ – tend to become severe limits on one’s freedom to act, violently or indeed in most other ways.63
人们有一种不幸的倾向,认为任意暴力的成功起诉在某种意义上是神圣的,或者至少把它与某种超验的力量联系起来。我们可能不会向任何设法肆意破坏而不受惩罚的暴徒或恶霸下跪(至少,如果他实际上不在房间里的话),但只要这样的人物设法建立自己真正站在法律之上,换句话说,是神圣的或独立的,另一个明显的普遍原则就会启动:为了使他与普通人生活的泥土和污垢分开,同一人物变得被限制包围。暴力者通常坚持尊重的信物,但尊重的信物到了宇宙学的层面 —— “不要碰地球”,“不要看太阳” —— 往往成为对一个人的自由行为的严格限制,无论是暴力还是其他方式。63
For most of history, this was the internal dynamic of sovereignty. Rulers would try to establish the arbitrary nature of their power; their subjects, insofar as they were not simply avoiding the kings entirely, would try to surround the godlike personages of those rulers with an endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces – or even, as in some of the cases of ‘divine kingship’ first made famous by Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, facing ritual death themselves.
在历史上的大部分时间里,这就是主权的内部动态。 统治者会试图确立其权力的任意性;他们的臣民,只要他们不是完全避开国王,就会试图用无尽的仪式限制迷宫来包围这些统治者的神一样的人物,以至于统治者最后实际上被囚禁在他们的宫殿里 —— 或者甚至像詹姆斯·弗雷泽爵士的《金枝》首次提出的一些 “神圣的王权” 案例那样,自己面临仪式性死亡。
So far, then, we have seen how each of the three principles we began with – violence, knowledge and charisma – could, in first-order regimes, become the basis for political structures which, in some ways, resemble what we think of as a state, but in others clearly don’t. None could in any sense be described as ‘egalitarian’ societies – they were all organized around a very clearly demarcated elite – but at the same time, it’s not at all clear how far the existence of such elites restricted the basic freedoms we described in earlier chapters. There is little reason to believe, for instance, that such regimes did much to impair freedom of movement: Natchez subjects seemed to have faced little opposition if they chose simply to move away from the proximity of the Great Sun, which they generally did. Neither do we find any clear sense of the giving or taking of orders, except in the sovereign’s immediate (and decidedly limited) ambit.
那么,到目前为止,我们已经看到我们开始时的三个原则 —— 暴力、知识和魅力 —— 如何在一阶政权中成为政治结构的基础,这些结构在某些方面类似于我们认为的国家,但在其他方面显然不是。没有一个社会在任何意义上可以被描述为 “平等主义” 社会 —— 它们都是围绕着一个非常明确划分的精英组织的 —— 但同时,也不清楚这种精英的存在在多大程度上限制了我们在前面章节中描述的基本自由。例如,几乎没有理由相信,这种制度对行动自由造成了很大的影响。如果纳奇兹的臣民只是选择离开大太阳的附近,他们似乎没有遇到什么反对,而他们一般都会这样做。我们也没有发现任何明确的下达或接受命令的意识,除了在君主的直接(和决定性的有限)范围内。
Another instructive case of sovereignty without the state is found in the recent history of South Sudan, among the Shilluk, a Nilotic people living alongside the Nuer. To recap, the early-twentieth-century Nuer were a pastoral society, of the sort often referred to in the anthropological literature as ‘egalitarian’ (though not, in fact, entirely so), because of their extreme distaste for any situation that might even suggest the giving and taking of orders. The Shilluk speak a western Nilotic language closely related to Nuer, and most believe that at some point in the past they were one people. While the Nuer occupied lands best fit for cattle-grazing, the Shilluk found themselves living along a fertile stretch of the White Nile, which allowed them to grow the local grain known as durra, and support dense populations. However, the Shilluk – unlike the Nuer – had a king. Known as the reth, this Shilluk monarch could also be seen as embodying sovereignty in the raw, in much the same way as the Natchez Great Sun.
在南苏丹最近的历史中,在与努埃尔人一起生活的尼罗河流域的 Shilluk 人中,发现了另一个没有国家的主权的启发案例。简而言之,二十世纪初的努埃尔人是一个牧民社会,在人类学文献中经常被称为 “平等主义”(尽管事实上并不完全如此),因为他们对任何可能暗示发号施令的情况都极为反感。希鲁克人讲一种与努尔人密切相关的西方尼罗河语言,大多数人认为在过去的某个时候他们是一个民族。当努尔人占据最适合放牛的土地时,希卢克人发现自己生活在白尼罗河的肥沃地带,这使他们能够种植被称为杜拉的当地谷物,并支持密集的人口。然而,与努尔人不同,希卢克人有一个国王。这个被称为 “reth” 的希卢克人君主也可以被看作是原始主权的体现,其方式与纳奇兹大太阳差不多。
Both the Great Sun and the Shilluk reth could act with total impunity, but only towards those in their immediate presence. Each normally resided in an isolated capital, where he conducted regular rituals to guarantee fertility and well-being. According to one Italian missionary, writing in the early twentieth century:
大太阳和希尔鲁克雷特都可以完全不受惩罚地行事,但只对他们身边的人。每个人通常都居住在一个与世隔绝的首都,在那里他定期举行仪式,以保证生育和福祉。据一位意大利传教士在二十世纪初写道:
The Reth lives isolated, as a rule, with some of his wives in the small but famous hill-village of Pacooda, known as Fashoda … His person is sacred and can be approached only with difficulty by ordinary people, and only with elaborate etiquette by the higher class. His appearance among the people, as for a journey, is rare and awe-inspiring, so that most people used to go into hiding or keep out of his path; girls especially do so.64
雷特通常与他的一些妻子隔离居住在帕库达(Pacooda)的一个小而著名的山村,称为法绍达(Fashoda)…… 他的人是神圣的,只有普通人难以接近,只有更高级别的人才能以复杂的礼节接近。他在人们中间的出现,就像一次旅行一样,是罕见的、令人敬畏的,所以大多数人都习惯于躲起来,或远离他的道路;女孩尤其如此。64
The latter presumably for fear of being snatched up and carried off to the royal harem. Yet to be a royal wife was not without advantages, as the college of royal wives was effectively what substituted for an administration, maintaining connections between Fashoda and their natal villages; and it was powerful enough, if the wives came to consensus, to order the king’s execution. Then again, the reth also had his henchmen: often these were orphans, criminals, runaways and other unattached persons who would gravitate to him. If the king attempted to mediate a local dispute and one party refused to comply, he would occasionally throw in his lot with the other side, raid the offending village and carry off what cattle and other things of value his men could get their hands on. The royal treasury thus consisted almost entirely of wealth that had been stolen, plundered in raids on foreigners or on the king’s own subjects.
后者可能是因为害怕被抢走,被带到王室的后宫去。然而,成为王室妻子并不是没有好处的,因为王室妻子协会实际上代替了行政机构,维持着法绍达和她们的家乡之间的联系;而且,如果妻子们达成共识,它有足够的权力下令处决国王。另外,国王也有他的随从:这些随从往往是孤儿、罪犯、离家出走者和其他无依无靠的人,他们会倾向于他。如果国王试图调解一场地方争端,而一方拒绝服从,他就会偶尔与另一方同流合污,袭击违法的村庄,并带走他的手下所能拿到的牛和其他有价值的东西。因此,皇家国库几乎完全由偷来的财富组成,这些财富是在袭击外国人或国王自己的臣民时掠夺来的。
All this might seem a pretty poor model for a free society – but in fact, in everyday affairs ordinary Shilluk appear to have maintained the same fiercely independent attitude as Nuer, and to have been just as averse to taking orders. Even the members of the ‘higher class’ (basically, descendants of earlier kings) could expect only a few gestures of deference, certainly not obedience. An old Shilluk legend sums it up nicely:
所有这一切似乎是一个自由社会的糟糕模式 —— 但事实上,在日常事务中,普通的希卢克人似乎保持着与努埃尔人一样的激烈的独立态度,并且同样不喜欢接受命令。即使是 “较高阶层” 的成员(基本上是早期国王的后裔)也只能期待一些恭敬的姿态,当然不是服从的姿态。一个古老的希鲁克人的传说很好地概括了这一点:
There was once a cruel king, who killed many of his subjects, he even killed women. His subjects were terrified of him. One day, to demonstrate that his subjects were so afraid they would do anything he asked, he assembled the Shilluk chiefs and ordered them to wall him up inside a house with a young girl. Then he ordered them to let him out again. They didn’t. So he died.65
曾经有一个残忍的国王,他杀死了许多臣民,甚至杀死了妇女。他的臣民对他感到恐惧。有一天,为了证明他的臣民非常害怕,他们会对他的要求言听计从,他召集了希鲁克族的首领,命令他们把他和一个年轻的女孩关在一间房子里。然后他命令他们再把他放出来。他们没有这样做。于是他就死了。65
If such oral traditions are anything to go on, Shilluk appear to have made a conscious choice that the sporadic appearance of an arbitrary and sometimes violent sovereign was preferable to any gentler but more systematic method of rule. Whenever a reth attempted to set up an administrative apparatus, even if only to collect tribute from defeated peoples, his actions were met with overwhelming waves of popular protest that either forced him to abandon the project or ousted him entirely.66
如果这种口述传统可以作为依据的话,希鲁克人似乎做出了一个有意识的选择,即一个任意的、有时是暴力的君主的零星出现比任何更温和但更系统的统治方法要好。每当一个雷特人试图建立一个行政机构,哪怕只是为了向被打败的民族收取贡品,他的行动都会遭到民众压倒性的抗议,这些抗议要么迫使他放弃这个项目,要么将他完全赶走。66
Unlike the Shilluk reth, Chavín and Olmec elites were able to mobilize enormous amounts of labour, but it’s not at all clear if they did so through chains of command. As we’ve seen in ancient Mesopotamia, corvée or periodic labour service could also be a festive, public-spirited, even levelling occasion. (And as we shall see in the case of ancient Egypt, the most authoritarian regimes still often ensured it continued to have something of the same spirit.) Lastly, then, we should consider the impact of such first-order regimes on our third basic form of freedom: the freedom to shift and renegotiate social relations, either seasonally or permanently. This is, of course, the hardest to assess. Certainly, most of these new forms of power had a decidedly seasonal element. During certain times of year, as with the makers of Stonehenge, the entire social apparatus of authority would dissolve away and effectively cease to exist. What seems most difficult to comprehend is how these strikingly new institutional arrangements, and the physical infrastructure that sustained them, came into being in the first place.
与 Shilluk reth 不同,Chavín 和 Olmec 的精英们能够动员大量的劳动力,但他们是否通过指挥系统来做到这一点并不清楚。正如我们在古代美索不达米亚看到的那样,徭役或定期劳动服务也可以是一种节日的、公共的、甚至是平坦的场合。(正如我们将在古埃及看到的那样,最专制的政权仍然经常确保它继续具有同样的精神。)最后,我们应该考虑这种一阶制度对我们第三种基本形式的自由的影响:季节性或永久性地转移和重新协商社会关系的自由。当然,这是最难评估的。当然,这些新的权力形式大多有明显的季节性因素。在一年中的某些时候,就像巨石阵的制造者一样,整个社会的权力机构都会消失,并有效地不复存在。最难理解的是,这些引人注目的新制度安排,以及支撑它们的物质基础设施,最初是如何形成的。
Who came up with the design for the labyrinthine temple of Chavín de Huántar, or the royal compounds of La Venta? Insofar as they were collectively conceived – as they may well have been67 – such grand fabrications may themselves be considered extraordinary exercises in human freedom. None of these first-order regimes could be considered examples of state formation – few now would even claim they were. So let’s turn instead to one of the only cases that pretty much everyone agrees can be considered a state, and which has served, in many ways, as a paradigm for all subsequent states: ancient Egypt.
谁想出了 Chavín de Huántar 的迷宫式神庙或 La Venta 的皇家大院的设计?只要它们是集体构思的 —— 因为它们很可能是集体构思的67 —— 这些宏伟的建筑本身可以被认为是对人类自由的非凡实践。这些一阶政权都不能被认为是国家形成的例子 —— 现在甚至很少有人会说它们是。因此,让我们转而看看几乎所有人都认为可以被视为国家的唯一案例之一,它在许多方面成为了所有后续国家的典范:古埃及。
If we had no written accounts to go by, but only the archaeological remains of the Natchez, would we have any way of knowing that a figure like the Great Sun even existed in Natchez society? Conceivably not. We would know that there were some fairly large mounds in the Great Village, built up in various stages, and no doubt post-holes would provide evidence for some large wooden structures built on them. Inside those structures, a number of hearths, refuse pits and scattered artefacts would undoubtedly point to some of the activities that went on there.68 Perhaps the only compelling evidence of kingship, though, would come in the form of burials of richly decorated bodies surrounded by sacrificed retainers – if, that is, archaeologists happened to locate them.69
如果我们没有文字记载,而只有纳奇兹人的考古遗迹,我们有办法知道在纳奇兹社会中是否存在像大太阳这样的人物?可以想象是没有的。我们会知道,在大村里有一些相当大的土丘,在不同的阶段建立起来,毫无疑问,柱洞会提供一些大型木制结构的证据。在这些建筑内,一些炉灶、垃圾坑和散落的手工艺品无疑会指出在那里进行的一些活动。68不过,也许唯一令人信服的王权证据,是由装饰丰富的尸体和牺牲的家臣组成的墓葬 —— 如果考古学家碰巧找到了它们。69
For some readers, the idea of a dead monarch sent off to the afterlife amid the corpses of his retainers might evoke images of early pharaohs. Some of Egypt’s earliest known kings, those of the First Dynasty around 3000 BC (who, in fact, were not yet referred to as ‘pharaoh’), were indeed buried in this way.70 But Egypt is not alone in this respect. Burials of kings surrounded by dozens, hundreds, on some occasions even thousands of human victims killed specially for the occasion can be found in almost every part of the world where monarchies did eventually establish themselves, from the early dynastic city-state of Ur in Mesopotamia to the Kerma polity in Nubia to Shang China. There are also credible literary descriptions from Korea, Tibet, Japan and the Russian steppes. Something similar seems to have occurred as well in the Moche and Wari societies of South America, and the Mississippian city of Cahokia.71
对于一些读者来说,一个死去的君主在其家臣的尸体中被送往来世的想法可能会唤起早期法老的形象。埃及已知最早的一些国王,即公元前 3000 年左右的第一王朝的国王(事实上,他们当时还没有被称为 “法老”),确实是以这种方式埋葬的。70但在这方面,埃及并不孤单。从美索不达米亚的乌尔早期王朝城邦到努比亚的科尔马政体,再到中国商朝,几乎在世界所有君主最终建立的地方都能找到国王的墓葬,周围有几十个、几百个,有时甚至有几千个专门为这种场合而杀的人。朝鲜、西藏、日本和俄罗斯大草原也有可靠的文学描述。类似的事情似乎也发生在南美洲的莫切和瓦里社会,以及密西西比的卡霍基亚城中。71
We might do well to think a bit more about these mass killings, because most archaeologists now treat them as one of the more reliable indications that a process of ‘state formation’ was indeed under way. They follow a surprisingly consistent pattern. Almost invariably, they mark the first few generations of the founding of a new empire or kingdom, often being imitated by rivals in other elite households; then the practice gradually fades away (though sometimes surviving in very attenuated versions, as in sati or widow-suicide among largely kshatriya – warrior-caste – families in much of South Asia). In the initial moment, the practice of ritual killing around a royal burial tends to be spectacular: almost as if the death of a ruler meant a brief moment when sovereignty broke free of its ritual fetters, triggering a kind of political supernova that annihilates everything in its path, including some of the highest and mightiest individuals in the kingdom.
我们不妨对这些大规模的杀戮进行更多的思考,因为大多数考古学家现在把它们视为更可靠的迹象之一,表明 “国家形成” 的过程确实正在进行。它们遵循一个令人惊讶的一致模式。几乎无一例外的是,它们,标志着一个新的帝国或王国建立的头几代,往往被其他精英家庭的对手所模仿;然后,这种做法逐渐消失(尽管有时会以非常微弱的形式存在,如南亚大部分地区的刹帝利 —— 战士种姓 —— 家庭中的殉情或寡妇自杀)。在最初的时刻,围绕皇室葬礼的杀戮仪式往往是壮观的:几乎就像统治者的死亡意味着一个短暂的时刻,主权挣脱了仪式的束缚,引发了一种政治超新星,消灭了其路径上的一切,包括王国中一些最高和最强大的个人。
Often, in that moment, close members of the royal family, high-ranking military officers and government officials are counted among the victims. Of course, if looking at a burial without written records, it’s often hard to tell when we’re dealing with the bodies of royal wives, viziers or court musicians, as opposed to those of war captives, slaves or commoners seized randomly on the road (as we know was sometimes done in Buganda or Benin) – or even entire military units (as was sometimes the case in China). Perhaps, indeed, the individuals named as kings and queens in the famous Royal Tombs of Ur were not really that at all, but just hapless victims, substitute figures or maybe high-ranking priests and priestesses dressed up as royalty.72
通常,在那一刻,皇室的亲密成员、高级军官和政府官员都被算在受害者之列。当然,如果看一个没有书面记录的墓葬,往往很难说我们面对的是皇室妻子、宰相或宫廷乐师的尸体,而不是那些战争俘虏、奴隶或在路上随意抓获的平民(我们知道在布干达或贝宁有时会这样做) —— 甚至是整个军事单位(在中国有时是这样的)。也许,在著名的乌尔皇陵中被称为国王和王后的人其实根本就不是国王和王后,而只是无助的受害者、替代人物,或者是装扮成皇室的高级祭司和女祭司。72
Even if some cases were just a particularly bloody form of costume drama, others clearly weren’t, so the question remains: why did early kingdoms ever do this sort of thing at all? And why did they stop doing it once their power became more established?
即使有些案例只是一种特别血腥的古装剧形式,但其他案例显然不是,所以问题仍然存在:为什么早期的王国曾经做过这种事情?为什么一旦他们的权力变得更加稳固,就不再这样做?
At the Shang capital of Anyang, on the central Chinese Plain, rulers tended to make their way into the afterlife accompanied by a few important retainers, who went voluntarily – if not always happily – to their deaths and were interred with due honours. These were only a small proportion of the bodies that went with them. It was also a royal prerogative to have one’s tomb surrounded by the bodies of sacrificial victims.73 Often these appear to be war captives taken from rival lineages and – unlike the retainers – their bodies were systematically mutilated, usually in mocking rearrangements of the victims’ heads. For the Shang, this seems to have been a way of denying their victims the possibility of becoming dynastic ancestors, thereby rendering the living members of their lineage unable to take part in the care and feeding of their own dead kin, ordinarily one of the fundamental duties of family life. Cast adrift, and socially scarred, the survivors were more likely to fall under the sway of the Shang court. The ruler became a greater ancestor, in effect, by preventing others from becoming ancestors at all.74
在中国中部平原的商朝首都安阳,统治者往往在少数重要家臣的陪同下进入来世,这些家臣自愿 —— 如果不总是快乐地 —— 走向死亡,并被以适当的荣誉安葬。这些人只占随行尸体的一小部分。墓穴周围摆放着牺牲者的尸体,这也是一项皇家特权。73通常,这些人似乎是来自敌对家族的战争俘虏,与家臣不同的是,他们的尸体被系统地肢解,通常是对受害者的头部进行嘲弄性的重新排列。 对商朝来说,这似乎是剥夺受害者成为王朝祖先的可能性的一种方式,从而使其活着的家族成员无法参与照顾和喂养自己死去的亲属,这通常是家庭生活的基本职责之一。漂泊在外,在社会上留下了伤痕,幸存者更有可能落入商朝的掌控之中。统治者实际上是通过阻止其他人成为祖先而成为更大的祖先。74
It’s interesting to bear this in mind when we turn to Egypt, because on the surface what we observe in the earliest dynasties seems the exact opposite. The first Egyptian kings, and at least one queen, are indeed buried surrounded by sacrificial victims, but those victims seem to have been drawn almost exclusively from their own inner circles. Our evidence for this derives from a series of 5,000-year-old burial chambers, looted in antiquity but still visible near the site of the ancient city of Abydos in the low desert of southern Egypt. These were the tombs of Egypt’s First Dynasty.75 Around each royal tomb lie long rows of subsidiary burials, numbering in the hundreds, forming a kind of perimeter. Such ‘retainer burials’ – including royal attendants and courtiers, killed in the prime of life – were placed in smaller brick compartments of their own, each marked with a gravestone inscribed with the individual’s official titles.76 There do not appear to be any dead captives or enemies among the buried. On the death of a king, then, his successor appears to have presided instead over the death of his predecessor’s courtly entourage, or at least a sizeable portion of it.
当我们转向埃及时,记住这一点是很有趣的,因为从表面上看,我们在最早的朝代所观察到的情况似乎完全相反。埃及最早的国王和至少一位王后确实被埋在牺牲品的周围,但这些牺牲品似乎几乎都是来自他们自己的内部圈子。我们的证据来自于一系列有 5000 年历史的墓室,这些墓室在古代被洗劫一空,但在埃及南部低洼沙漠中的阿比多斯古城遗址附近仍然可见。这些是埃及第一王朝的陵墓。75在每个王室墓穴周围都有一长排附属墓葬,数量多达数百个,形成了一种围墙。这种 “家臣墓” —— 包括皇家侍从和朝臣,在生命的黄金时期被杀害 —— 被放置在他们自己的较小的砖块隔间里,每个隔间都有一个墓碑,上面刻着个人的官方头衔。76被埋葬者中似乎没有任何死去的俘虏或敌人。那么,在国王去世后,他的继任者似乎反而主持了其前任宫廷随从的死亡,或者至少是其中相当大的一部分。
So why all this ritual killing at the birth of the Egyptian state? What was the actual purpose of subsidiary burials? Was it to protect the dead king from the living, or the living from the dead king? Why did those sacrificed include so many who had evidently spent their lives caring for the king: most likely including wives, guards, officials, cooks, grooms, entertainers, palace dwarfs and other servants, grouped by rank around the royal tomb, according to their roles or occupation? There is a terrible paradox here. On the one hand, we have a ritual that appears to be the ultimate expression of love and devotion, as those who on a day-to-day basis made the king into something king-like – fed him, clothed him, trimmed his hair, cared for him in sickness and kept him company when he was lonely – went willingly to their deaths, to ensure he would continue to be king in the afterlife. At the same time, these burials are the ultimate demonstration that for a ruler, even his most intimate subjects could be treated as personal possessions, casually disposed of like so many blankets, gaming boards or jugs of spelt. Many have speculated about what it all means. Likely as not, 5,000 years ago, many of those laying out the bodies wondered too.
那么,为什么在埃及国家诞生时要进行这些仪式性的杀戮?辅助埋葬的实际目的是什么?是为了保护死去的国王不被活人伤害,还是活人不被死去的国王伤害?为什么被献祭的人中包括那么多显然是用生命来照顾国王的人:很可能包括妻子、卫兵、官员、厨师、马夫、艺人、宫廷小矮人和其他仆人,根据他们的角色或职业,按等级组合在皇陵周围?这里有一个可怕的悖论。一方面,我们有一个似乎是爱和奉献的终极表达的仪式,因为那些每天都把国王变成类似国王的人 —— 给他喂食,给他穿衣,给他修剪头发,在他生病时照顾他,在他孤独时陪伴他 —— 心甘情愿地去死,以确保他在来世能继续当国王。同时,这些葬礼最终表明,对于一个统治者来说,即使是他的最亲密的臣民也可以被当作个人财产,像许多毯子、游戏板或斯佩尔特酒一样被随意处置。许多人都在猜测这一切意味着什么。很可能,5000 年前,许多摆放尸体的人也在想。
Written records from the time don’t give us much sense of the official motives, but one thing that’s quite striking in the evidence we do have – largely, a list of names and titles – is the very mixed composition of these royal cemeteries. They seem to include both blood relatives of the early kings and queens, notably some female members of the royal family, and a good number of other individuals who were taken in as members of the royal household owing to their unusual skills or striking personal qualities, and who thus came to be seen as members of the king’s extended family. The violence and shedding of blood that attended these mass funerary rituals must have gone some way to effacing those differences, melding them into a single unit, turning servants into relatives and relatives into servants. In later times the king’s close kin represented themselves in exactly this way, by placing in their tombs some humble replicas of themselves engaged in acts of menial labour, such as grinding grain or cooking meals.77
当时的书面记录并没有让我们了解到官方的动机,但在我们所掌握的证据中,有一点是相当引人注目的 —— 主要是姓名和头衔的清单 —— 那就是这些皇家墓地的组成非常混杂。它们似乎既包括早期国王和王后的血亲,特别是王室的一些女性成员,也包括大量的其他个人,他们由于不同寻常的技能或引人注目的个人品质而被接纳为王室成员,因此他们被视为国王大家庭的成员。在这些大规模的葬礼仪式中,暴力和流血一定在一定程度上消除了这些差异,将他们融为一体,将仆人变成亲戚,将亲戚变成仆人。在后来的时代,国王的近亲正是以这种方式代表他们自己,在他们的坟墓中放置一些卑微的复制品,从事琐碎的劳动,如研磨谷物或做饭。77
When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a ‘patrimonial system’: that is, one in which all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king. Turning erstwhile strangers into part of the royal household, or denying them their own ancestors, are thereby ultimately two sides of the same coin.78 Or to put things another way, a ritual designed to produce kinship becomes a method of producing kingship.
当主权首次扩展成为一个社会的一般组织原则时,它是通过将暴力变成亲属关系来实现的。在中国和埃及,早期的大规模杀戮的壮观阶段,无论它可能做什么,似乎都是为了奠定马克斯·韦伯所说的 “世袭制” 的基础:即所有国王的臣民都被想象为王室成员,至少在他们都在为国王工作的程度上。把以前的陌生人变成王室的一部分,或者否定他们自己的祖先,因此最终是一个硬币的两面。78或者换个说法,一个旨在产生亲属关系的仪式成为产生王权的方法。
These extreme forms of ritual killing around royal burials ended fairly abruptly in the course of Egypt’s Second Dynasty. However, the patrimonial polity continued to expand – not so much in the sense of expanding Egypt’s external borders, which were established early on through outward violence directed at neighbours in Nubia and elsewhere,79 but more in terms of reshaping the lives of its internal subjects. Within a few generations we find the valley and delta of the Nile divided into royal estates, each dedicated to provisioning the mortuary cults of different former rulers; and, not long after that, the foundation of entire ‘workers’ towns’ devoted to the construction of the pyramids on the Giza Plateau, drawing corvée labour from up and down the country.80
在埃及第二王朝时期,围绕皇室墓葬的这些极端形式的仪式性杀戮突然结束。然而,宗主国政体继续扩张 —— 与其说是扩大埃及的外部边界,不如说是通过对努比亚和其他地方的邻国实施暴力而建立的早期边界。79但更多的是在重新塑造其内部臣民的生活方面。在几代人的时间里,我们发现尼罗河的河谷和三角洲被划分为皇室庄园,每个庄园都致力于为不同的前统治者提供祭祀用品;不久之后,整个 “工人城镇” 的建立,致力于在吉萨高原上建造金字塔,从全国各地吸收徭役劳工。80
At this point, with the construction of the great pyramids at Giza, surely no one could deny that we are in the presence of some sort of state; but the pyramids, of course, were also tombs. In the case of Egypt, it seems, ‘state formation’ began with some kind of Natchez or Shilluk-like principle of individual sovereignty, bursting out of its ritual cages precisely through the vehicle of the sovereign’s demise in such a way that royal death ultimately became the basis for reorganizing much of human life along the length of the Nile. To understand how this could happen, we need to look at what Egypt was like well before the First Dynasty tombs at Abydos.
在这一点上,随着吉萨大金字塔的建造,肯定没有人会否认我们处于某种国家的存在;但金字塔当然也是坟墓。就埃及而言,“国家的形成” 似乎始于某种类似纳奇兹或希尔鲁克的个人主权原则,正是通过君主死亡的载体,从其仪式的笼子里迸发出来,以至于皇家的死亡最终成为重组尼罗河沿岸大部分人类生活的基础。为了理解这种情况是如何发生的,我们需要看看在阿比多斯第一王朝墓葬之前的埃及是什么样子。
Before we consider what happened in the centuries directly preceding Egypt’s First Dynasty – the so-called Predynastic and Proto-dynastic periods, from around 4000 to 3100 BC – it is worth casting our minds back to an even earlier phase of prehistory in the same region.
在我们考虑埃及第一王朝之前的几个世纪所发生的事情之前 —— 所谓的前王朝和原王朝时期,大约从公元前 4000 年到 3100 年 —— 值得把我们的思绪拉回到同一地区的更早的史前阶段。
Let’s recall that the African Neolithic, including that of the Nile valley – Egyptian and Sudanese – took a different form to that of the Middle East. In the fifth millennium BC, there was less of an emphasis on cereal agriculture and more on cattle, along with the wide variety of wild and cultivated food sources typical of the period. Perhaps the best modern comparison we have – though it’s very far from exact – is with Nilotic peoples like the Nuer, Dinka, Shilluk or Anuak, who grow crops but think of themselves as pastoralists, shifting back and forth each season between camps improvised for the occasion. If we might hazard a very broad generalization, where in the Middle Eastern Neolithic (the Fertile Crescent) the cultural focus – in the sense of decorative arts, care and attention – was on houses, in Africa it was on bodies: from very early on we have burials with beautifully worked objects of personal grooming and highly elaborate sets of body ornamentation.81
让我们回顾一下,非洲新石器时代,包括尼罗河流域的新石器时代 —— 埃及和苏丹 —— 采取了与中东不同的形式。在公元前五千年,人们不太重视谷物农业,而更重视牛,以及该时期典型的各种野生和栽培食物来源。也许我们所拥有的最好的现代比较 —— 尽管它非常不准确 —— 是与努尔人、丁卡人、希鲁克人或阿努克人这样的尼罗河民族进行比较,他们种植农作物,但认为自己是牧民,每个季节在临时搭建的营地之间来回转换。如果我们可以冒昧地概括一下,在中东新石器时代(新月沃土),文化的重点 —— 从装饰艺术、护理和关注的意义上来说 —— 是在房屋上,而在非洲则是在身体上:从很早开始,我们就有带着精美的个人梳妆用品和高度精致的身体装饰品的墓葬。81
It’s no coincidence that many centuries later, when the Egyptian First Dynasty took form, among the very first objects with royal inscriptions we find the ‘ivory comb of King Djet’ and the famous ‘palette of King Narmer’ (stone palettes being used, both by men and women, for grinding and mixing make-up). These are basically spectacular versions of the sort of objects Neolithic Nile dwellers used to beautify themselves millennia earlier and, not coincidentally, to offer as gifts to the ancestral dead; and in Neolithic and Predynastic times, such objects were widely available to women, men and children. In fact from those very early times, in Nilotic society the human body itself became a sort of monument. Experiments with techniques of mummification took place long before the First Dynasty; as early as the Neolithic period, Egyptians were already mixing aromatics and preservative oils to produce bodies that could last forever and whose places of burial were the fixed points of reference in an ever-shifting social landscape.82
几个世纪后,当埃及第一王朝形成时,在第一批带有皇家铭文的物品中,我们发现了 “Djet 国王的象牙梳” 和著名的 “Narmer 国王的调色板”(石调色板是男人和女人用来研磨和混合化妆的),这并不是巧合。这些基本上都是新石器时代的尼罗河居民在几千年前用来美化自己的物品的壮观版本,而且,并非巧合的是,这些物品是作为礼物献给祖先的死者的;在新石器时代和前王朝时代,这些物品对妇女、男子和儿童都很普遍。事实上,从那些非常早期的时代开始,在尼罗河社会,人体本身就成为一种纪念物。早在第一王朝之前就有木乃伊技术的实验;早在新石器时代,埃及人就已经开始混合芳香剂和防腐油来制造可以永久保存的尸体,其埋葬地点是一个不断变化的社会景观中的固定参照点。82
How, then, do we get from such a remarkably fluid state of affairs to the spectacular appearance of the First Dynasty almost 2,000 years later? Territorial kingdoms don’t come out of nowhere.83 Until quite recently, we had little more than fragmentary hints of what must have been happening during what are technically referred to as the Predynastic and Proto-dynastic periods – that is, roughly the fourth millennium, before King Narmer appears around 3100 BC . In such cases, it is tempting to revert to analogies with more recent situations. As we’ve seen, modern Nilotic peoples, and particularly the Shilluk, show how relatively mobile societies that place great value on individual freedom might, nonetheless, prefer an arbitrary despot – who could eventually be got rid of – to any more systematic or pervasive form of rule. This is especially true if, like so many peoples whose ancestors organized their lives around livestock, they tend toward patriarchal forms of organization.84 One could imagine the prehistoric Nile valley as dominated by a collection of Shilluk-like reths, each with their own settlement which was, essentially, an extended patriarchal family; bickering and feuding with one another, but otherwise, as yet, making fairly little difference to the lives of those over whom they ostensibly ruled.
那么,我们是如何从这样一个非常不稳定的状态到近两千年后第一王朝的壮观出现的呢?领土王国并不是凭空出现的。83直到最近,我们对技术上被称为前王朝和原王朝时期 —— 也就是大约第四个千年,在公元前 3100 年左右纳默尔国王出现之前 —— 所发生的事情还只是零星的暗示。在这种情况下,很容易恢复到与更近的情况进行类比。正如我们所看到的,现代尼罗河流域的人民,特别是希鲁克人,显示了那些高度重视个人自由的相对流动的社会,如何宁愿选择一个任意的暴君 —— 他最终可以被摆脱 —— 而不是任何更系统或普遍的统治形式。如果像许多其祖先围绕牲畜组织生活的民族一样,他们倾向于父权制的组织形式,那就更是如此。84我们可以想象,史前的尼罗河流域是由一群类似于 Shilluk 的reths主导的,每个人都有自己的定居点,本质上是一个扩展的父系家庭;彼此争吵和争斗,但除此之外,对他们表面上所统治的人的生活没有什么影响。
Still, there is no substitute for actual archaeological evidence – and in recent years it has been building up apace. New discoveries show that, by no later than 3500 BC – and so still some five centuries before the First Dynasty – we do indeed find burials of petty monarchs at various locations throughout the valley of the Nile, and also down into Nubia. We don’t know any of their names, since writing had barely developed yet. Most of these kingdoms appear to have been extremely small. The largest we know of centred on Naqada and Abydos, near the great bend of the Nile in Upper Egypt; on Hierakonpolis further to the south; and on the site of Qustul in Lower Nubia – but even those do not seem to have controlled extensive territories.85
然而,实际的考古证据是无法替代的 —— 近年来,这些证据一直在迅速积累。新的发现表明,不晚于公元前 3500年 —— 因此在第一王朝之前大约五个世纪 —— 我们确实在整个尼罗河流域的不同地点发现了小君主的墓葬,而且还进入了努比亚。我们不知道他们的名字,因为当时文字还没有发展起来。这些王国中的大多数似乎都是非常小的。我们所知道的最大的王国集中在上埃及的尼罗河大拐弯处的纳卡达和阿比多斯;再往南的希拉孔波利斯;以及下努比亚的库斯图尔遗址 —— 但即使这些地方似乎也没有控制广泛的领土。85
What preceded the First Dynasty, then, was not so much a lack of sovereign power as a superfluity of it: a surfeit of tiny kingdoms and miniature courts, always with a core of blood relatives and a motley collection of henchmen, wives, servants and assorted hangers-on. Some of these courts appear to have been quite magnificent in their own way, leaving behind large tombs and the bodies of sacrificed retainers. The most spectacular, at Hierakonpolis, includes not only a male dwarf (they seem to have become a fixture of courtly society very early on), but a significant number of teenage girls, and what seem to be the remains of a private zoo: a menagerie of exotic animals including two baboons and an African elephant.86 These kings give every sign of making grandiose, absolute, cosmological claims; but little sign of maintaining administrative or military control over their respective territories.
因此,在第一王朝之前,与其说是缺乏主权,不如说是主权过剩:小王国和微型宫廷过多,总是有一个核心的血亲和一群杂乱无章的随从、妻子、仆人和各种挂名者。其中一些宫廷似乎以自己的方式相当宏伟,留下了大型墓穴和牺牲的家臣的尸体。最壮观的是在希拉孔波利斯,不仅有一个男性侏儒(他们似乎很早就成为宫廷社会的固定成员),还有大量的少女,以及似乎是私人动物园的遗迹:包括两只狒狒和一头非洲大象在内的异国动物。86这些国王有各种迹象表明他们提出了宏伟的、绝对的、宇宙论的主张;但几乎没有迹象表明他们对各自的领土保持行政或军事控制。
How do we get from here to the massive agrarian bureaucracy of later, dynastic times in Egypt? Part of the answer lies in a parallel process of change that archaeology also allows us to untangle, around the middle of the fourth millennium BC – we might imagine it as a kind of extended argument or debate about the responsibilities of the living to the dead. Do dead kings, like live ones, still need us to take care of them? Is this care different from the care accorded ordinary ancestors? Do ancestors get hungry? And if so, what exactly do they eat? For whatever reasons, the answer that gained traction across the Nile valley around 3500 BC was that ancestors do indeed get hungry, and what they required was something which, at that time, can only have been considered a rather exotic and perhaps luxurious form of food: leavened bread and fermented wheat beer, the pot-containers for which now start to become standard fixtures of well-appointed grave assemblages. It is no coincidence that arable wheat-farming – though long familiar in the valley and delta of the Nile – was only refined and intensified around this time, at least partly in response to the new demands of the dead.87
我们是如何从这里走到埃及后来的王朝时代的大规模农业官僚机构的?答案的一部分在于一个平行的变化过程,考古学也允许我们解开这个过程,大约在公元前四千年中期 —— 我们可以把它想象成一种关于生者对死者的责任的延伸争论或辩论。死去的国王和活着的国王一样,是否仍然需要我们照顾他们?这种照顾与给予普通祖先的照顾有区别吗?祖先们会饿吗?如果是的话,他们到底吃什么?不管出于什么原因,公元前 3500 年左右,在整个尼罗河流域得到的答案是,祖先确实会饿,而他们所需要的东西,在当时只能被认为是一种相当奇特的、也许是奢侈的食物形式:发面面包和发酵的小麦啤酒,这些罐子现在开始成为装备精良的墓群的标准装置。虽然在尼罗河流域和三角洲长期以来,但可耕种的小麦种植在这一时期才得到完善和加强,至少部分是为了满足死者的新要求,这并非巧合。87
The two processes – agronomic and ceremonial – were mutually reinforcing, and the social effects epochal. In effect, they led to the creation of what might be considered the world’s first peasantry. As in so many parts of the world initially favoured by Neolithic populations, the periodic flooding of the Nile had at first made permanent division of lands difficult; quite likely, it was not ecological circumstances but the social requirement to provide bread and beer on ceremonial occasions that allowed such divisions to become entrenched. This was not just a matter of access to sufficient quantities of arable land, but also the means to maintain ploughs and oxen – another introduction of the late fourth millennium BC . Families who found themselves unable to command such resources had to obtain beer and loaves elsewhere, creating networks of obligation and debt. Hence important class distinctions and dependencies did, in fact, begin to emerge,88 as a sizeable sector of Egypt’s population found itself deprived of the means to care independently for ancestors.
这两个过程 —— 农学和礼仪 —— 是相互促进的,其社会效果是划时代的。实际上,它们导致了可能被认为是世界上第一个农民的产生。正如新石器时代人口最初喜欢的世界上许多地方一样,尼罗河的定期泛滥起初使土地的永久划分变得困难;很可能不是生态环境,而是在仪式上提供面包和啤酒的社会要求,使这种划分变得根深蒂固。这不仅仅是获得足够数量的可耕地的问题,也是维持犁和牛的手段 —— 这是公元前四千年晚期的另一个引入。发现自己无法获得这些资源的家庭不得不从其他地方获得啤酒和面包,形成了义务和债务网络。因此,事实上,重要的阶级区分和依赖性开始出现了。88因为埃及有相当一部分人口发现自己被剥夺了独立照顾祖先的手段。
If any of this seems fanciful, we need only compare what happened with the extension of Inca sovereignty in Peru. Here, too, we find a contrast between the traditional, varied and flexible regime of everyday foodstuffs – in this case centring on cuisine made from freeze-dried potatoes (chuño) – and the introduction of a completely different sort of food, in this case, maize beer (chicha), which was considered fit for the gods and also gradually became, as it were, the food of empire.89 By the time of the Spanish conquest, maize was a ritual necessity for rich and poor alike. Gods and royal mummies dined on it; armies marched on it; and those too poor to grow it – or who lived too high up on the altiplano – had to find other ways of obtaining it, often ending up in debt to the royal estate as a result.90
如果这一切看起来很玄乎,我们只需比较一下印加主权在秘鲁的扩展情况就知道了。在这里,我们也发现了传统的、多样的、灵活的日常食品制度 —— 在这种情况下,以冻干土豆(chuno)制成的菜肴为中心 —— 与引入一种完全不同的食物之间的对比,在这种情况下,玉米啤酒(chicha)被认为适合于神灵,也逐渐成为帝国的食物。89到了西班牙征服时期,玉米已经成为富人和穷人的一种仪式性必需品。神灵和皇家木乃伊以玉米为食;军队以玉米为粮;而那些太过贫穷而无法种植玉米的人 —— 或住在高原上的人 —— 不得不寻找其他途径来获得玉米,结果往往是欠下皇家财产的债务。90
In the case of Peru, we have the Spanish chroniclers to help us understand how an intoxicant could gradually become the lifeblood of an empire; in Egypt, 5,000 years ago, we can really only guess at the details. It is a remarkable tribute to the discipline of archaeology that we know as much as we do, and we are starting to put the pieces together. For instance, it is around 3500 BC that we begin to find remains of facilities used for both baking and brewing – first alongside cemeteries, and within a few centuries attached to palaces and grand tombs.91 A later depiction, from the tomb of an official called Ty, shows how they could have operated, with pot-baked bread and beer produced by a single process. The gradual extension of royal authority, and also administrative reach, throughout Egypt began around the time of the First Dynasty or a little before, with the creation of estates ostensibly dedicated to organizing the provision, not so much of living kings but of dead ones, and eventually dead royal officials too. By the time of the Great Pyramids (c .2500 BC ), bread and beer were being manufactured on an industrial scale to supply armies of workers during their seasonal service on royal construction projects, when they too got to be ‘relatives’ or at least care-givers of the king, and as such were at least temporarily well provisioned and well cared for.
就秘鲁而言,我们有西班牙编年史学家帮助我们了解一种麻醉剂如何逐渐成为一个帝国的命脉;在 5000 年前的埃及,我们真的只能猜测细节。这是对考古学学科的一个了不起的敬意,我们知道的这么多,而且我们开始把这些碎片放在一起。例如,大约在公元前 3500 年,我们开始发现,用于烘烤和酿造的设施的遗迹 —— 首先是在墓地旁边,并在几个世纪内与宫殿和大墓相连。91后来,在一个叫 Ty 的官员的墓中,有一幅描绘显示了他们是如何操作的,用锅里的面包和啤酒通过一个过程生产。王室权力和行政管理范围在整个埃及的逐步扩大,大约始于第一王朝时期或稍早,表面上看是建立了专门用于组织供应的庄园,与其说是供应活着的国王,不如说是供应死去的国王,最终也是供应死去的王室官员。到了大金字塔时期(约公元前 2500 年),面包和啤酒被以工业化的规模制造出来,供应给在皇家建筑项目上季节性服务的工人大军,这时他们也成了国王的 “亲戚” 或至少是照顾者,因此至少暂时得到了充足的供给和良好的照顾。
The workers’ town at Giza produced some thousands of ceramic moulds. These were used to make the huge communal loaves known as bedja bread, eaten in large groups with copious amounts of meat supplied by royal livestock pens and washed down with spiced beer.92 The latter was of special importance for the solidarity of seasonal work crews in Old Kingdom Egypt. The facts emerge with disarming simplicity, from graffiti on the reverse sides of building blocks used in the construction of royal pyramids. ‘Friends of [the king] Menkaure’ reads one such, ‘Drunkards of Menkaure’ another. These seasonal work units (or phyles, as Egyptologists call them) seem to have been made up only of men who passed through special age-grade rituals, and who modelled themselves on the organization of a boat’s crew.93 Whether such ritual brotherhoods ever took to the water together isn’t clear, but there are notable parallels between the team skills used in maritime engineering and those used in manipulating multi-ton blocks of limestone and granite for royal pyramid-temples or other such monuments.94
吉萨的工人城镇生产了大约数千个陶瓷模具。这些模具被用来制作巨大的公共面包,称为 bedja 面包,大伙儿在一起吃,配上皇家牲畜圈提供的大量肉类,用香料啤酒冲服。92后者对于旧王国埃及的季节性工作团队的团结特别重要。这些事实从建造皇家金字塔所用的积木背面的涂鸦中简单明了地显现出来。其中 “国王门考尔的朋友” 是这样写的,“门考尔的醉汉” 是另一个。这些季节性的工作单位(或埃及学家称之为 phyles)似乎只由经过特殊的年龄等级仪式的人组成,他们仿照船只的船员组织。93这种仪式上的兄弟们是否曾一起出海并不清楚,但在海上工程中使用的团队技能与在皇家金字塔庙宇或其他此类纪念碑中操纵多吨重的石灰石和花岗岩的技能之间存在明显的相似之处。94
There may be interesting parallels to explore here with what happened in the Industrial Revolution, when techniques of discipline, transforming crews of people into clock-like machines, were first pioneered on sailing ships and only later transferred to the factory floor. Were ancient Egyptian boat crews the model for what have been called the world’s first production-line techniques, creating vast monuments, far more impressive than anything the world had yet seen, by dividing tasks into an endless variety of simple, mechanical components: cutting, dragging, hoisting, polishing? This is how the pyramids were actually built: by rendering subjects into great social machines, afterwards celebrated by mass conviviality.95
这里可能有一些有趣的相似之处,可以探索工业革命中发生的事情,当时的纪律技术,将船员变成了像时钟一样的机器,首先是在帆船上开创的,后来才转移到工厂车间。 古埃及船员是被称为世界上第一个生产线技术的典范吗?他们通过将任务划分为无尽的简单机械部件:切割、拖拽、提升、抛光,创造出比世界上任何东西都更令人印象深刻的巨大纪念碑?这就是金字塔的实际建造方式:通过将臣民变成伟大的社会机器,然后通过大规模的欢庆活动来庆祝。95
We have just described, in broad outline, what’s widely treated as the world’s first known example of ‘state formation’. It would be easy to go on from here to generalize. Perhaps this is what a state actually is: a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion.
我们刚刚大致描述了被广泛认为是世界上第一个已知的 “国家形成” 的例子。从这里可以很容易地进行概括。也许这就是国家的实际情况:特殊的暴力和创造复杂的社会机器的结合,表面上都是致力于关怀和奉献的行为。
There is obviously a paradox here. Caring labour is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labour: it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared-for – whether child, adult, animal or plant – in order to provide what they require to flourish.96 Caring labour is distinguished by its particularity. If those institutions we today refer to as ‘states’ really do have any common features, one must certainly be a tendency to displace this caring impulse on to abstractions; today this is usually ‘the nation’, however broadly or narrowly defined. Perhaps this is why it’s so easy for us to see ancient Egypt as a prototype for the modern state: here too, popular devotion was diverted on to grand abstractions, in this case the ruler and the elite dead. This process is what made it possible for the whole arrangement to be imagined, simultaneously, as a family and as a machine, in which everyone (except of course the king) was ultimately interchangeable. From the seasonal work of tomb-building to the daily servicing of the ruler’s body (recall again how the first royal inscriptions are found on combs and make-up palettes), most of human activity was directed upwards, either towards tending rulers (living and dead) or assisting them with their own task of feeding and caring for the gods.97 All this activity was seen as generating a downward flow of divine blessings and protection, which occasionally took material form in the great feasts of the workers’ towns.
这里显然存在着一个悖论。关爱劳动在某种程度上与机械劳动截然相反:它是关于认识和理解被照顾者 —— 无论是儿童、成人、动物还是植物 —— 的独特品质、需求和特殊性,以便提供他们所需要的东西,使其繁荣。96照料劳动因其特殊性而与众不同。如果那些我们今天称为 “国家” 的机构真的有任何共同的特点,其中一个肯定是将这种关怀的冲动转移到抽象事物上的趋势;今天这通常是 “国家”,无论其定义是广义还是狭义。也许这就是为什么我们很容易将古埃及视为现代国家的原型:在这里,民众的奉献也被转移到了宏大的抽象事物上,在这种情况下,统治者和精英的死亡。这个过程使得整个安排有可能同时被想象成一个家庭和一台机器,其中每个人(当然除了国王)最终都是可以替换的。从建造坟墓的季节性工作到统治者身体的日常服务(再次回顾一下最早的皇家铭文是如何在梳子和调色板上发现的),人类的大部分活动都是向上的,要么照顾统治者(活着的和死去的),要么协助他们完成自己的任务,即喂养和照顾神灵。97所有这些活动都被视为产生了一种向下的神的祝福和保护,这些祝福和保护偶尔会以物质形式出现在工人城镇的大宴会上。
The problems come when we try to take this paradigm and apply it almost anywhere else. True, as we’ve noted, there are some interesting parallels between Egypt and Peru (all the more remarkable, considering their strikingly different topographies – the flat and easily navigable Nile as against the ‘vertical archipelagos’ of the Andes). These parallels appear in uncanny details, like the mummification of dead rulers and the way in which such mummified rulers continue to maintain their own rural estates; the way living kings are treated as gods who have to make periodic tours of their domains. Both societies too shared a certain antipathy to urban life. Their capitals were really ceremonial centres, stages for royal display, with relatively few permanent residents, and their ruling elites preferred to imagine their subjects as living in a realm of bucolic estates and hunting grounds.98 But all this only serves to underline the degree to which other cases referred to in the literature as ‘early states’ were entirely different.
当我们试图将这一范式应用于几乎任何其他地方时,问题就来了。诚然,正如我们所注意到的,埃及和秘鲁之间有一些有趣的相似之处(考虑到它们惊人的不同地形 —— 平坦且易于航行的尼罗河与安第斯山脉的 “垂直群岛” 相比,更加引人注目)。这些相似之处出现在一些不可思议的细节中,比如将死去的统治者制成木乃伊,以及这些木乃伊统治者继续保持自己的农村庄园的方式;活着的国王被当作神,必须定期巡视他们的领地。这两个社会也都对城市生活有某种反感。他们的首都实际上是礼仪中心,是皇家展示的舞台,永久居民相对较少,而他们的统治精英更愿意把他们的臣民想象成生活在田园风光和狩猎场的领域。98但这一切只是为了强调文献中提到的 “早期国家” 的其他情况完全不同的程度。
The kingdom of Egypt and the Inca Empire demonstrate what can happen when the principle of sovereignty arms itself with a bureaucracy and manages to extend itself uniformly across a territory. As a result, they are very often invoked as primordial examples of state formation, even though they are dramatically separated in time and space. Almost none of the other canonical ‘early states’ appear to have taken this approach.
埃及王国和印加帝国展示了当主权原则与官僚机构武装起来并设法在整个领土上统一扩展时,会发生什么。因此,它们经常被援引为国家形成的原始例子,尽管它们在时间和空间上有很大的差距。其他经典的 “早期国家” 似乎都没有采取这种方法。
Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, for instance, was made up of dozens of city-states of varying sizes, each governed by its own charismatic warrior-king – whose special, individual qualities were said to be recognized by the gods, and physically marked in the outstanding virility and allure of his body – all vying constantly for dominance. Only occasionally would one ruler gain enough of an upper hand to create something that might be described as the beginnings of a unified kingdom or empire. It’s not clear whether any of these early Mesopotamian rulers actually claimed ‘sovereignty’ – at least in the absolute sense of standing outside the moral order and thus being able to act with impunity, or to create entirely new social forms of their own volition. The cities they ostensibly ruled over had been around for centuries: commercial hubs with strong traditions of self-governance, each with its own city gods who presided over local systems of temple administration. Kings, in this case, almost never claimed to be gods themselves, but rather the gods’ vicegerents, and sometimes heroic defenders on earth: in short, delegates of sovereign power that resided properly in heaven.99 The result was a dynamic tension between two principles which, as we’ve seen, originally arose in opposition to one another: the administrative order of the river valleys and the heroic, individualistic politics of the surrounding highlands. Sovereignty, in the last resort, belonged to the gods alone.100
例如,早期美索不达米亚王朝是由数十个大小不一的城邦组成的,每个城邦都由自己的魅力战士国王统治 —— 据说他的特殊的个人素质得到了神的认可,并以其出色的阳刚之气和诱人的身体为标志 —— 所有人都在不断争夺统治权。只有偶尔会有一个统治者获得足够的优势,创造出可能被描述为统一王国或帝国的雏形。目前还不清楚这些早期美索不达米亚统治者中是否有人真正声称拥有 “主权” —— 至少在绝对意义上,站在道德秩序之外,从而能够不受惩罚地行事,或者按照自己的意愿创造全新的社会形式。他们表面上统治的城市已经存在了几个世纪:具有强大的自治传统的商业中心,每个城市都有自己的城市之神,主持着当地的神庙管理制度。在这种情况下,国王们几乎从未声称自己是神,而是神的代行者,有时是人间的英雄卫士:简而言之,是主权权力的代表,而主权权力恰恰在天上。99结果是两种原则之间的动态紧张关系,正如我们所看到的,这两种原则最初是相互对立的:河谷的行政秩序和周围高地的英雄主义、个人主义政治。主权,在最后,只属于诸神。100
The Maya lowlands were different again. To be a Classic Maya ruler (ajaw) was to be a hunter and god-impersonator of the first rank, a warrior whose body, on entering battle or during dance rituals, became host to the spirit of an ancestral hero, deity or dreamlike monsters. Ajaws were, effectively, like tiny squabbling gods. If anything was projected into the cosmos, in the Classic Maya case, it was precisely the principle of bureaucracy. Most Mayanists would agree that Classic-period rulers lacked a sophisticated administrative apparatus, but they imagined the cosmos as itself a kind of administrative hierarchy, governed by predictable laws:101 an intricate set of celestial or subterranean wheels within wheels, such that it was possible to establish the exact birth and death dates of major deities thousands of years in the past (the deity Muwaan Mat, for instance, was born on 7 December 3121 BC, seven years before the creation of the current universe), even if it would never occur to them to register the numbers, wealth, let alone birthdates of their own subjects.102
玛雅低地的情况又有所不同。成为古典玛雅统治者(Ajaw)就是要成为第一等级的猎人和神的化身,一个战士在进入战场或在舞蹈仪式中,其身体成为祖先的英雄、神灵或梦境般的怪物的主人。Ajaws 实际上就像微小的争吵的神灵。如果有什么东西被投射到宇宙中,在古典玛雅的情况下,这正是官僚主义的原则。大多数玛雅人都会同意,古典时期的统治者缺乏复杂的行政机构,但他们把宇宙本身想象成一种行政等级制度,由可预测的法律来管理。101一套错综复杂的天体或地下轮子中的轮子,这样就有可能确定过去几千年来主要神灵的确切出生和死亡日期(例如,神灵 Muwaan Mat 生于公元前 3121 年 12 月 7 日,比当前宇宙的创造早 7 年),即使他们永远不会想到要登记他们自己臣民的人数、财富,更不用说出生日期。102
So do these ‘early states’ have any common features at all? Obviously, some basic generalizations can be made. All deployed spectacular violence at the pinnacle of the system; all ultimately depended on and to some degree mimicked the patriarchal organization of households. In every case, the apparatus of government stood on top of some kind of division of society into classes. But as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, these elements could just as well exist without or prior to the creation of central government – and even when such government was established, they could take very different forms. In Mesopotamian cities, for instance, social class was often based on land tenure and mercantile wealth. Temples doubled as city banks and factories. Their gods might only leave the temple grounds on festive occasions, but priests moved in broader circles, making interest-bearing loans to traders, watching over armies of female weavers and jealously guarding their fields and flocks. There were powerful societies of merchants. We know much less about such matters in the Maya lowlands, but what we do know suggests that power was based less on the control of land or commerce than on the ability to control flows of people and loyalty directly, through intermarriage and the intensely personal bonds that obtained between lords and lesser nobles. Hence the focus, in Classic Maya politics, on capturing high-status rivals in warfare as a form of ‘human capital’ (something which hardly features in Mesopotamian sources).103
那么,这些 “早期状态” 是否有任何共同特征呢?显然,我们可以做出一些基本的概括。所有的国家都在制度的顶峰部署了惊人的暴力;所有的国家最终都依赖于并在某种程度上模仿了家庭的父权制组织。在每一种情况下,政府机构都是建立在某种社会阶层划分的基础之上的。但正如我们在前几章中所看到的,这些元素也可以在没有或在中央政府建立之前存在,而且即使在这种政府建立之后,它们也可以采取非常不同的形式。例如,在美索不达米亚的城市中,社会阶层往往基于土地保有权和商业财富。寺庙同时也是城市银行和工厂。他们的神可能只在节日的时候离开寺庙,但祭司们在更广泛的圈子里活动,向商人提供有息贷款,看管女织工的军队,并嫉妒地看守他们的田地和羊群。还有一些强大的商人协会。我们对玛雅低地的这些事情了解得较少,但我们所知道的情况表明,权力与其说是基于对土地或商业的控制,不如说是基于通过通婚和领主与小贵族之间强烈的个人联系,直接控制人流和忠诚度的能力。因此,在古典玛雅政治中,重点是在战争中俘获地位高的对手,作为一种 “人力资本” 的形式(这在美索不达米亚的资料中很少见)。103
Looking at China only seems to complicate things even further. In the time of the late Shang, from 1200 to 1000 BC, Chinese society did share certain features with the other canonical ‘early states’ but, considered as an integrated whole, it’s entirely unique. Like Inca Cuzco, the Shang capital at Anyang was designed as a ‘pivot of the four quarters’ – a cosmological anchor for the entire kingdom, laid out as a grand stage for royal ritual. Like both Cuzco and the Egyptian capital of Memphis (and later Thebes), the city was suspended between the worlds of the living and the dead, serving as home to the royal cemeteries and their attached mortuary temples, as well as a living administration. Its industrial quarters produced enormous quantities of bronze vessels and jades, the tools used in communing with ancestors.104 But in most important ways, we find little similarity between the Shang and either Old Kingdom Egypt or Inca Peru. For one thing, Shang rulers did not claim sovereignty over an extended area. They couldn’t travel safely, let alone issue commands, outside a narrow band of territories clustered on the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, not far from the royal court.105 Even there one is left with a sense that they didn’t really claim sovereignty in the same sense as Egyptian, Peruvian or even Mayan rulers. The clearest evidence is the exceptional importance of divination in the early Chinese state, which stands in striking contrast to pretty much all the other examples we’ve been looking at.106
看一下中国,似乎会使事情变得更加复杂。在晚商时期,即公元前 1200 年至公元前 1000 年,中国社会确实与其他经典的 “早期国家” 有某些共同特征,但作为一个整体考虑,它是完全独特的。与印加的库斯科一样,安阳的商朝首都被设计成 “四方的枢纽” —— 整个王国的宇宙锚,被布置成皇家仪式的大舞台。与库斯科和埃及首都孟菲斯(以及后来的底比斯)一样,这座城市被悬挂在生者和死者的世界之间,作为皇家墓地及其附属的殡仪馆的所在地,同时也是一个生活管理机构。它的工业区生产了大量的青铜器和玉器,是与祖先交流的工具。104但在最重要的方面,我们发现商朝与旧王国埃及或秘鲁印加之间几乎没有任何相似之处。首先,商代统治者并不要求对一个广泛的地区拥有主权。他们不能在离王室不远的黄河中下游地区聚集的狭窄地带之外安全地旅行,更不用说发布命令。105即使在那里,人们也会感觉到,他们并没有像埃及、秘鲁甚至玛雅统治者那样真正主张主权。最明显的证据是,占卜在早期中国国家中的特殊重要性,这与我们一直在看的几乎所有其他例子形成了鲜明的对比。106
Effectively, any royal decision – whether war, alliance, the founding of new cities, or even such apparently trivial matters as extending royal hunting grounds – could only proceed if approved by the ultimate authorities, who were the gods and ancestral spirits; and there was no absolute assurance that such approval would be forthcoming in any given case. Shang diviners appealed to gods through the medium of burnt offerings. The process was as follows: when hosting gods or ancestors at a ritual meal, kings or their diviners put turtle shells and ox scapulae on the fire, then ‘read’ the cracks that broke out on their surfaces as a kind of oracular writing. The proceedings were quite bureaucratic. Once an answer had been obtained, the diviner or an appointed scribe would then authorize the reading by etching an inscription on to bone or shell, and the resulting oracle would be stored for later consultation.107 These oracle texts are the first written inscriptions in China we actually know about, and while it is very possible that writing was used for everyday purposes on perishable media that don’t survive, there remains as yet no clear evidence for the other forms of administrative activity or archives that became so typical of later Chinese dynasties, nor much in the way of an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus at all.108
实际上,任何皇家决定 —— 无论是战争、结盟、建立新的城市,甚至是扩大皇家狩猎场这样明显的小事 —— 只有在得到最终权威,即神灵和祖先的批准后才能进行;而且在任何特定的情况下都不能绝对保证这种批准会到来。商朝的占卜者通过燔祭的方式向神灵提出请求。其过程如下:当接待神灵或祖先的时候,国王或他们的占卜者将龟甲和牛胛骨放在火上,然后 “阅读” 它们表面出现的裂缝,作为一种神谕文字。这个过程是相当官僚化的。一旦得到答案,占卜者或指定的抄写员就会在骨头或贝壳上刻上铭文,授权阅读,然后将得到的神谕储存起来,供以后参考。107这些甲骨文是我们实际知道的中国最早的书面铭文,虽然很有可能是在易腐烂的媒介上用于日常的书写,但至今还没有明确的证据表明其他形式的行政活动或档案成为中国后期王朝的典型,也没有什么复杂的官僚机构。108
Like the Maya, Shang rulers routinely waged war to acquire stocks of living human victims for sacrifices. Rival courts to the Shang had their own ancestors, sacrifices and diviners, and while they appear to have recognized the Shang as paramount – especially in ritual contexts – there seemed to be no contradiction between this and actually going to war with them, if they felt there was sufficient cause. Such rivalries help explain the lavishness of Shang funerals and mutilation of captive bodies; their rulers were still in a sense playing the agonistic games typical of a ‘heroic society’, competing to outshine and humiliate their rivals. Such a situation is inherently unstable and eventually one rival dynasty, the Western Zhou, did manage definitively to defeat the Shang, and claimed for itself the Mandate of Heaven.109
像玛雅人一样,商代统治者经常发动战争,以获得用于祭祀的活人储备。与商朝对立的宫廷有他们自己的祖先、祭祀和占卜者,虽然他们似乎承认商朝是最重要的 —— 特别是在仪式方面 —— 但如果他们认为有足够的理由,这与实际与他们开战之间似乎没有矛盾。这种竞争有助于解释商代葬礼的奢华和对俘虏尸体的残害;在某种意义上,他们的统治者仍然在玩 “英雄社会” 典型的激动人心的游戏,争相超越和羞辱他们的对手。这种情况本身是不稳定的,最终有一个对手王朝,即西周,确实设法明确地击败了商,并为自己争取到了天命。109
At this point it should be clear that what we are really talking about, in all these cases, is not the ‘birth of the state’ in the sense of the emergence, in embryonic form, of a new and unprecedented institution that would grow and evolve into modern forms of government. We are speaking instead of broad regional systems; it just happens, in the case of Egypt and the Andes, that an entire regional system became united (at least some of the time) under a single government. This was actually a fairly unusual arrangement. More common were arrangements such as those in Shang China, where unification was largely theoretical; or Mesopotamia, where regional hegemony rarely lasted for longer than a generation or two; or the Maya, where there was a protracted struggle between two main power blocs, neither of which could ever quite overcome the other.110
在这一点上,我们应该清楚,在所有这些案例中,我们真正谈论的不是 “国家的诞生”,也就是说,一个新的、前所未有的机构以胚胎的形式出现,并发展成为现代政府形式。我们说的是广泛的区域系统;只是在埃及和安第斯山脉的情况下,整个区域系统在一个单一的政府下实现了统一(至少在某些时候)。这实际上是一种相当不寻常的安排。更常见的是诸如中国商朝的安排,那里的统一在很大程度上是理论上的;或者美索不达米亚,那里的区域霸权很少持续超过一两代人;或者玛雅,那里有两个主要权力集团之间的长期斗争,其中任何一方都无法完全克服另一方。110
In terms of the specific theory we’ve been developing here, where the three elementary forms of domination – control of violence, control of knowledge, and charismatic power – can each crystallize into its own institutional form (sovereignty, administration and heroic politics), almost all these ‘early states’ could be more accurately described as ‘second-order’ regimes of domination. First-order regimes like the Olmec, Chavín or Natchez each developed only one part of the triad. But in the typically far more violent arrangements of second-order regimes, two of the three principles of domination were brought together in some spectacular, unprecedented way. Which two it was seems to have varied from case to case. Egypt’s early rulers combined sovereignty and administration; Mesopotamian kings mixed administration and heroic politics; Classic Maya ajaws fused heroic politics with sovereignty.
就我们在这里发展的具体理论而言,统治的三种基本形式 —— 对暴力的控制、对知识的控制和魅力型权力 —— 可以各自固化为自己的制度形式(主权、行政和英雄政治),几乎所有这些 “早期国家” 都可以更准确地描述为统治的 “二阶” 制度。像奥尔梅克、Chavín 或 Natchez 这样的一阶政权各自只发展了三要素中的一部分。但在二阶政权通常更为暴力的安排中,三个统治原则中的两个被以某种壮观的、前所未有的方式结合在一起。具体是哪两个,似乎因人而异。埃及的早期统治者把主权和行政结合起来;美索不达米亚的国王把行政和英雄政治结合起来;古典玛雅人把英雄政治和主权结合起来。
We should emphasize that it’s not as if any of these principles, in their elementary forms, were entirely absent in any one case: in fact, what seems to have happened is that two of them crystallized into institutional forms – fusing in such a way as to reinforce one another as the basis of government – while the third form of domination was largely pushed out of the realm of human affairs altogether and displaced on to the non-human cosmos (as with divine sovereignty in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, or the cosmic bureaucracy of the Classic Maya). Keeping all this in mind, let’s return briefly to Egypt to clarify some remaining points.
我们应该强调的是,这些原则中的任何一个,以其基本形式,在任何一个案例中都不是完全没有。事实上,所发生的事情似乎是其中两个具体化为制度形式 —— 以这样一种方式融合,以加强彼此作为政府的基础 —— 而第三种统治形式在很大程度上被完全挤出人类事务的领域,转移到非人类的宇宙中(如美索不达米亚早期王朝的神圣主权,或古典玛雅的宇宙官僚制度)。考虑到这一切,让我们简单地回到埃及,以澄清剩下的一些问题。
The architects of Egypt’s Old Kingdom clearly saw the world they were creating as something like a cultured pearl, reared in precious isolation. Their vision is vividly documented in relief carvings of stone, lining the walls of royal temples, which served the mortuary cults of kings such as Djoser, Menkaure, Sneferu and Sahure. Here Egypt, the ‘Two Lands’, is always represented as both a celestial theatre-state, in which king and gods share equal billing, and an earthly domain: a world of rural estates and hunting grounds, mapped out in a cartography of compliance, each parcel of land personified as a lady-in-waiting who brings her bounty to the feet of the king. The governing principle of this vision of Egypt is the monarch’s absolute sovereignty over everything, symbolized in his gigantic funerary monuments, his defiant assertion that there was nothing he could not conquer, even death.
埃及旧王国的建筑师们清楚地看到,他们所创造的世界就像一颗养殖的珍珠,在珍贵的隔离环境中成长。他们的设想被生动地记录在石头浮雕中,这些浮雕排列在皇家寺庙的墙壁上,为 Djoser、Menkaure、Sneferu 和 Sahure 等国王的停尸崇拜服务。在这里,埃及,“两地”,总是被表现为一个天国,国王和众神在其中分享平等的权利,同时也是一个尘世的领域:一个由农村庄园和狩猎场组成的世界,在地图上标出,每块土地都被视为一个女仆,把她的赏金送到国王的脚下。这种埃及愿景的指导原则是君主对一切事物的绝对主权,这在他巨大的葬礼纪念碑中得到了象征,他轻蔑地宣称没有什么是他不能征服的,甚至死亡。
Egyptian kingship was, however, Janus-faced. Its inner visage was that of supreme patriarch, standing guard over a vastly extended family – a Great House (the literal meaning of ‘pharaoh’). Its outer face is shown in depictions of the king as a war leader or hunt leader asserting control over the country’s wild frontiers; all were fair game when the king turned his violence upon them.111 This is very different, however, to heroic violence. In a way, it’s the opposite. In a heroic order, the warrior’s honour is based on the fact that he might lose; his reputation means so much to him that he is willing to stake his life, dignity and freedom to defend it. Egyptian rulers, in these early periods, never represent themselves as heroic figures in this sense. They could not, conceivably, lose. As a result, wars are not represented as ‘political’ contests, which imply a match between potential equals. Instead, combat and the chase alike were assertions of ownership, endless rehearsals of the same sovereignty the king exercised over his people and which ultimately derived from his kinship with the gods.
然而,埃及的王权是雅努斯式的。它的内在面孔是最高的族长,站在一个庞大的家族 —— 一个伟大的家族(“法老” 的字面意思)的一边。它的外在形象表现在对国王的描述中,即作为战争领袖或狩猎领袖,对国家的野生边界进行控制;当国王对他们实施暴力时,所有的人都是公平的。111然而,这与英雄式的暴力非常不同。在某种程度上,它恰恰相反。在英雄的秩序中,战士的荣誉是建立在他可能会输的基础上的;他的名誉对他来说非常重要,他愿意用自己的生命、尊严和自由来捍卫它。在这些早期时期,埃及统治者从未在这个意义上将自己表现为英雄人物。可以想象,他们不可能会输。因此,战争不是作为 “政治” 竞赛来表现的,这意味着潜在平等者之间的竞争。相反,战斗和追逐都是对所有权的宣示,是国王对其人民行使的主权的无休止的演练,而这种主权最终来自于他与众神的亲缘关系。
As we’ve already had occasion to observe, any form of sovereignty at once so absolute and so personal as a pharaoh’s will necessarily pose severe problems of delegation. Here, too, all state officials had to be in some sense appendages of the king’s own person. Major landowners, military commanders, priests, administrators and other senior government officials also held titles like ‘Keeper of the King’s Secrets’, ‘Beloved Acquaintance of the King’, ‘Director of Music to the Pharaoh’, ‘Overseer of the Palace Manicurists’ or even ‘of the King’s Breakfast’. We are not suggesting that power games were absent here; no doubt there’s never been a royal court without jockeying for position, tricks and double-dealing and political intrigue. The point is that these were not public contests, and no sanctioned space existed for open competition. Everything remained confined to life at court. This is abundantly clear in the ‘tomb biographies’ of Old Kingdom officials, which describe their life achievements almost exclusively in terms of their relationship to and their care for the king, rather than any personal qualities or attainments.112
正如我们已经注意到的那样,任何像法老这样既绝对又个人的主权形式都必然会带来严重的授权问题。在这里,所有的国家官员也必须在某种意义上成为国王本人的附属品。主要的地主、军事指挥官、牧师、行政官员和其他高级政府官员也拥有 “国王的秘密守护者”、“国王的心腹之交”、“法老的音乐总监”、“宫殿美甲师的监督者” 甚至是 “国王的早餐” 等头衔。我们并不是说这里没有权力游戏;毫无疑问,从来没有一个皇室宫廷不为地位、诡计和双重交易以及政治阴谋而争斗。问题是,这些都不是公开的竞争,也没有为公开竞争提供认可的空间。一切都局限在宫廷生活中。这一点在旧王国官员的 “墓葬传记” 中表现得非常清楚,这些传记几乎只描述了他们与国王的关系和对国王的关怀,而不是任何个人素质或成就。112
What we have in this case, then, seems to be a hypertrophy of the principles of sovereignty and administration and an almost complete absence of competitive politics. Dramatic public contests of any sort, political or otherwise, were well-nigh non-existent. There is nothing in the official sources of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (nor much in later periods of ancient Egyptian history) that is remotely reminiscent of, say, Roman chariot-racing or Olmec or Zapotec ball games. In the royal jubilee or sed festival, when Egyptian kings ran a circuit to celebrate the unification of the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, it took the form of a solo performance, the outcome of which was never in doubt. Insofar as competitive politics appears in later Egyptian literature (which it occasionally does), it takes place precisely between the gods, as in works like the Contendings of Horus and Seth . Dead kings, perhaps, compete with one another; but by the time sovereignty comes down to the domain of mortals, matters have already been settled.
那么,在这种情况下,我们所看到的似乎是主权和管理原则的膨胀,而几乎完全没有竞争性政治。任何形式的戏剧性的公共竞赛,无论是政治还是其他方面,都几乎不存在。在埃及旧王国的官方资料中,没有任何东西能让人联想到罗马的战车比赛或奥尔梅克或萨波特克的球赛(后来的古埃及历史时期也是如此)。在皇家庆典或 sed 节上,当埃及国王跑了一圈来庆祝上、下埃及两地的统一时,它采取了单独表演的形式,其结果是毫无疑问的。只要竞争性政治出现在后来的埃及文学中(偶尔也会出现),它就恰恰发生在诸神之间,如《荷鲁斯与塞特之争》等作品中。死去的国王,也许会相互竞争;但当主权落到凡人的领域时,事情已经解决了。
Just to be utterly clear about what we are saying here, when we speak of an absence of charismatic politics we are talking about the absence of a ‘star system’ or ‘hall of fame’, with institutionalized rivalries between knights, warlords, politicians and so on. We are most certainly not speaking about an absence of individual personalities. It’s just that in a pure monarchy there is only one person, or at best a handful of individuals, who really matter. Indeed, if we are trying to understand the appeal of monarchy as a form of government – and it cannot be denied that for much of recorded human history it was a very popular one – then likely it has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time. The king is both the ultimate individual, his quirks and fancies always to be indulged like a spoilt baby, and at the same time the ultimate abstraction, since his powers over mass violence, and often (as in Egypt) mass production, can render everyone the same.
为了彻底弄清楚我们在这里说的是什么,当我们谈到没有魅力的政治时,我们谈论的是没有 “明星系统” 或 “名人堂”,以及骑士、军阀、政治家等之间制度化的竞争。我们最,当然不是在说没有个人的个性。只是在一个纯粹的君主制中,真正重要的只有一个人,或者最多只有少数几个人。事实上,如果我们试图理解君主制作为一种政府形式的吸引力 —— 不可否认,在有记载的人类历史的大部分时间里,君主制是一种非常受欢迎的形式 —— 那么它很可能与它同时调动关怀性质和赤裸裸的恐怖情绪的能力有关。国王既是最终的个体,他的怪癖和狂想总是像被宠坏的婴儿一样被放纵,同时又是最终的抽象,因为他对大规模暴力,以及经常(如在埃及)大规模生产的权力,可以使每个人都一样。
It is also worth observing that monarchy is probably the only prominent system of government we know of in which children are crucial players, since everything depends on the monarch’s ability to continue the dynastic line. The dead can be worshipped under any regime – even the United States, which frames itself as a beacon of democracy, creates temples to its Founding Fathers and carves portraits of dead presidents into the sides of mountains – but infants, pure objects of love and nurture, are only politically important in kingdoms and empires.
同样值得注意的是,君主制可能是我们所知道的唯一一个孩子是关键人物的政府体系,因为一切都取决于君主延续王朝血统的能力。死者在任何政权下都可以被崇拜 —— 甚至是美洲,它把自己定位为民主的灯塔,为其开国元勋建立庙宇,把死去的总统的肖像刻在山的两侧 —— 但婴儿,纯粹的爱和养育对象,只有在王国和帝国中才具有政治重要性。
If the ancient Egyptian regime is often held out as the first true state and a paradigm for all future ones, it is largely because it was capable of synthesizing absolute sovereignty – the monarch’s ability to stand apart from human society and engage in arbitrary violence with impunity – with an administrative apparatus which, at certain moments at least, could reduce almost everyone to cogs in a single great machine. Only heroic, competitive politics was lacking, pushed off into the worlds of gods and the dead. But there was, of course, a great exception to this which comes precisely in those periods when central authority broke down, the supposed ‘dark ages’, beginning with the First Intermediate period (c . 2181–2055 BC ).
如果古埃及政权经常被认为是第一个真正的国家,也是所有未来国家的典范,那主要是因为它能够将绝对主权 —— 君主有能力脱离人类社会,任意使用暴力而不受惩罚 —— 与行政机构结合起来,至少在某些时候,它可以将几乎所有人都变成一台伟大机器的齿轮。只有英雄式的、竞争性的政治是缺乏的,被推到了神和死者的世界。但是,当然也有一个很大的例外,那就是中央权力崩溃的那些时期,即所谓的 “黑暗时代”,从第一中间时期(约公元前 2181-2055 年)开始。
Already towards the end of the Old Kingdom, ‘nomarchs’ or local governors had made themselves into de facto dynasties.113 When the central government split between rival centres at Herakleopolis and Thebes, such local leaders began to take over most functions of government. Often referred to as ‘warlords’, these nomarchs were in fact nothing like the petty kings of the Predynastic period. At least in their own monuments, they represent themselves as something closer to popular heroes, even saints. Neither was this always just idle boasting; some were indeed revered as saints for centuries to come. No doubt charismatic local leaders had always existed in Egypt; but with the breakdown of the patrimonial state, such figures could begin to make open claims of authority based on their personal achievements and attributes (bravery, generosity, oratorical and strategic skills) and – crucially – redefine social authority itself as based on qualities of public service and piety to the gods of their local town, and the popular support those qualities inspired.
早在旧王国末期,“Nomarchs” 或地方总督就已经把自己变成了事实上的王朝。113当中央政府在 Herakleopolis 和底比斯的敌对中心之间分裂时,这些地方领导人开始接管政府的大部分职能。通常被称为 “军阀”,这些游牧者实际上与前王朝时期的小国王完全不同。至少在他们自己的纪念碑中,他们把自己表现为更接近于大众英雄,甚至是圣人的东西。这也并不总是空穴来风;有些人确实在以后的几个世纪里被尊为圣人。毫无疑问,有魅力的地方领导人在埃及一直存在;但随着宗法制国家的瓦解,这些人物可以开始根据他们的个人成就和属性(勇敢、慷慨、演说和战略技巧)公开宣称自己的权威,而且 —— 关键是 —— 重新定义社会权威本身,使其基于公共服务和对当地城镇的神灵的虔诚的品质,以及这些品质所激发的公众支持。
In other words, whenever state sovereignty broke down, heroic politics returned – with charismatic figures just as vainglorious and competitive, perhaps, as those we know from ancient epics, but far less bloodthirsty. The change is clearly visible in autobiographical inscriptions, like those in the rock-cut tomb of the nomarch Ankhtifi at El-Mo’alla, south of Thebes. Here’s how he narrates his role in war: ‘I was one who found the solution when it was lacking, thanks to my vigorous plans; one with commanding words and untroubled mind on the day when the nomes [administered territories] allied together (to wage war). I am the hero without equal; one who spoke freely while people were silent on the day when fear was spread and Upper Egypt did not dare to speak.’ Even more striking, here’s how he celebrates his social achievements:
换句话说,每当国家主权瓦解时,英雄政治就回来了 —— 其魅力人物也许就像我们从古代史诗中知道的那些人一样虚荣和竞争,但远没有那么嗜血。这种变化在自传式的碑文中清晰可见,比如底比斯南部 El-Mo‘alla 的安克提菲(Ankhtifi)的岩石切割墓中的碑文。他是这样叙述自己在战争中的作用的:“我是一个在缺乏解决方案时找到解决方案的人,这要归功于我有力的计划;在诺米人(管理的领土)联合起来(发动战争)的那一天,我有指挥的话语和不乱的心态。我是无以伦比的英雄;在恐惧蔓延、上埃及不敢说话的那一天,我畅所欲言,而人们却沉默不语。” 更引人注目的是,他是这样庆祝自己的社会成就的:
I gave bread to the hungry and clothing to the naked; I anointed those who had no cosmetic oil; I gave sandals to the barefooted; I gave a wife to him who had no wife. I took care of the towns of Hefat [El-Mo’alla] and Hor-mer in every [crisis, when] the sky was clouded and the earth [was parched? And people died] of hunger on this sandbank of Apophis. The south came with its people and the north with its children; they brought finest oil in exchange for barley which was given to them … All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger and people were eating their children, but I did not allow anybody to die of hunger in this nome … never did I allow anybody in need to go from this nome to another one. I am the hero without equal.114
我给饥饿的人面包,给赤身的人衣服;我给没有化妆品油的人抹油;我给赤脚的人穿凉鞋;我给没有妻子的人送妻子。我在每一次危机中照顾赫法特 El-Mo'alla 和霍尔默镇,当时]天空乌云密布,大地[干枯?人们在阿波菲斯的这个沙洲上饿死了。南方人带着他们的人民来了,北方人带着他们的孩子来了;他们带来了最好的油,以换取给他们的大麦…… 整个上埃及都快饿死了,人们在吃他们的孩子,但我不允许任何人在这个国度饿死…… 我从不允许任何有需要的人从这个国度到另一个国家去。我是无以伦比的英雄。114
It’s only at this point, in the First Intermediate period, that we see a hereditary aristocracy coming into its own in Egypt, as local magnates like Ankhtifi began transferring their powers to their offspring and extended families. Aristocracy and personal politics had no such recognized place in the Old Kingdom, precisely because they came into conflict with the principle of sovereignty. In summary, the transition from Old Kingdom to First Intermediate period was not so much a shift from ‘order’ to ‘chaos’ – as Egyptological orthodoxy once had it – as a swing from ‘sovereignty’ to ‘charismatic politics’ as different ways of framing the exercise of power. With that came a shift in emphasis, from the people’s care of god-like rulers to the care of the people as a legitimate path to authority. In ancient Egypt, as so often in history, significant political accomplishments occur in precisely those periods (the so-called ‘dark ages’) that get dismissed or overlooked because no one was building grandiose monuments in stone.
在这一点上,在第一中间时期,我们才看到世袭贵族制度在埃及开始发挥作用,因为像安克蒂菲这样的地方大亨开始将他们的权力转移给他们的后代和大家庭。贵族和个人政治在旧王国没有这种公认的地位,正是因为它们与主权原则发生了冲突。总之,从旧王国到第一中期的过渡,与其说是从 “秩序” 到 “混乱” 的转变 —— 埃及学的正统观念曾经这样认为 —— 不如说是从 “主权” 到 “魅力政治” 的摇摆,是对权力行使的不同框架。随之而来的是重点的转移,从人民对神一样的统治者的关怀,到把对人民的关怀作为获得权力的合法途径。在古埃及,正如历史上经常发生的那样,重大的政治成就恰恰发生在那些因为没有人在石头上建造宏伟的纪念碑而被驳回或忽略的时期(所谓的 “黑暗时代”)。
At this point it should be easy enough to understand why ancient Egypt is so regularly held out as the paradigmatic example of state formation. It’s not just that it is chronologically the earliest of what we’ve called second-order regimes of domination; aside from the much later Inca Empire, it’s also just about the only case where the two principles that came together were sovereignty and administration. In other words, it’s the only case from a suitably distant phase of history that perfectly fits the model of what should have happened. All such assumptions really go back to a certain kind of social theory – or, maybe better put, a theory of organization – that we described at the start of Chapter Eight. Small, intimate groups (the argument goes) might be able to adopt informal, egalitarian means of problem-solving, but as soon as large numbers of people are assembled together in a city or a kingdom everything changes.
在这一点上,我们应该很容易理解为什么古埃及经常被当作国家形成的典范例子。这不仅仅是因为它在时间上是我们所说的最早的二阶统治制度;除了更晚的印加帝国之外,它也是唯一一个将主权和行政这两个原则结合起来的案例。换句话说,它是唯一一个来自适当遥远的历史阶段的案例,完全符合应该发生的模式。所有这些假设实际上都可以追溯到我们在第八章开始时描述的某种社会理论 —— 或者,也许更确切地说,一种组织理论。小而亲密的群体(这种说法)也许能够采用非正式的、平等主义的手段来解决问题,但一旦大量的人聚集在一个城市或王国里,一切都会改变。
It’s simply assumed, in this kind of theory, that once societies scale up they will need, as Robin Dunbar puts it, ‘chiefs to direct, and a police force to ensure that social rules are adhered to’; or as Jared Diamond says, ‘large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws.’115 In other words, if you want to live in a large-scale society you need a sovereign and an administration. It is more or less taken for granted that some kind of monopoly of coercive force (again, the ability to threaten everyone with weapons) is ultimately required in order to do this. Writing systems, in turn, are almost invariably assumed to have developed in the service of impersonal bureaucratic states, which were the result of the whole process.
在这种理论中,人们简单地假设,一旦社会规模扩大,他们将需要,如罗宾·邓巴所说,“酋长来指挥,警察部队来确保社会规则得到遵守”;或者如贾里德·戴蒙德所说,“如果没有做出决定的领导人、执行决定的行政人员和管理决定和法律的官僚,大量人口就无法运作。115换句话说,如果你想生活在一个大规模的社会中,你需要一个君主和一个行政机构。或多或少被认为是理所当然的,为了做到这一点,最终需要某种垄断性的强制力(同样,用武器威胁每个人的能力)。而书写系统则几乎无一例外地被认为是为非个人化的官僚国家服务而发展起来的,而这正是整个过程的结果。
Now, as we’ve already seen, none of this is really true, and predictions based on these assumptions almost invariably turn out to be wrong. We saw one dramatic example in Chapter Eight. It was once widely assumed that if bureaucratic states tend to arise in areas with complex irrigation systems, it must have been because of the need for administrators to co-ordinate the maintenance of canals and regulate the water supply. In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there’s little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters. Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite ‘egalitarian’, were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today. Meanwhile most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn’t care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches.
现在,正如我们已经看到的,这些都不是真的,基于这些假设的预测几乎无一例外地变成了错误。我们在第八章看到了一个戏剧性的例子。人们曾经普遍认为,如果官僚国家倾向于在具有复杂灌溉系统的地区出现,那一定是因为需要行政人员来协调运河的维护和调节供水。事实上,事实证明,农民完全有能力自己协调非常复杂的灌溉系统,而且在大多数情况下,几乎没有证据表明早期的官僚与这些事情有任何关系。城市人口似乎有一种非凡的自我管理能力,虽然通常不完全是 “平等主义”,但可能比今天几乎任何城市政府的参与性要强得多。同时,事实证明,大多数古代皇帝认为没有理由进行干预,因为他们根本不关心他们的臣民如何打扫街道或维护他们的排水沟。
We’ve also observed that when early regimes do base their domination on exclusive access to forms of knowledge, these are often not the kinds of knowledge we ourselves would consider particularly practical (the shamanic, psychotropic revelations that seem to have inspired the builders of Chavín de Huántar would be one such example). In fact, the first forms of functional administration, in the sense of keeping archives of lists, ledgers, accounting procedures, overseers, audits and files, seem to emerge in precisely these kinds of ritual contexts: in Mesopotamian temples, Egyptian ancestor cults, Chinese oracle readings and so forth.116 So one thing we can now say with a fair degree of certainty is that bureaucracy did not begin simply as a practical solution to problems of information management, when human societies advanced beyond a particular threshold of scale and complexity.
我们还注意到,当早期政权确实将其统治建立在对知识形式的独占上时,这些知识往往不是我们自己认为特别实用的那种知识(萨满教的精神启示似乎激发了 Chavín de Huántar 的建造者,就是这样一个例子)。事实上,功能管理的最初形式,在保留清单、分类账、会计程序、监督员、审计和档案的档案的意义上,似乎正是在这些类型的仪式 :在美索不达米亚的神庙、埃及的祖先崇拜、中国的甲骨文阅读等背景下出现的。116因此,我们现在可以相当肯定地说,当人类社会的规模和复杂性超过一个特定的门槛时,官僚机构并不仅仅是作为信息管理问题的实际解决方案而开始的。
This, however, raises the interesting question of where and when such technologies did first arise, and for what reason. Here there’s some surprising new evidence too. Our emerging archaeological understanding suggests that the first systems of specialized administrative control actually emerged in very small communities. The earliest clear evidence of this appears in a series of tiny prehistoric settlements in the Middle East, dating over 1,000 years after the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük was founded (at around 7400 BC ), but still more than 2,000 years before the appearance of anything even vaguely resembling a city.
然而,这提出了一个有趣的问题,即这种技术是在什么地方和什么时候首次出现的,以及出于什么原因。这里也有一些令人惊讶的新证据。我们新兴的考古学认识表明,第一批专门的行政控制体系实际上是在非常小的社区中出现的。这方面最早的明确证据出现在中东的一系列微小的史前定居点中,其时间比新石器时代的恰塔霍裕克遗址(大约在公元前 7400 年)的建立时间晚了 1000 多年,但比任何甚至是隐约类似于城市的东西的出现都早了 2000 多年。
The best example of such a site is Tell Sabi Abyad, investigated by a team of Dutch archaeologists working in Syria’s Balikh valley in the province of Raqqa. Around 8,000 years ago (c .6200 BC ), in what was prehistoric Mesopotamia, a one-hectare village was destroyed there by fire, baking its mud walls and many of their clay contents, thus preserving them. While obviously a very bad bit of luck for the inhabitants, it was a stroke of brilliant luck for future researchers, since it has left us a unique insight into the organization of a Late Neolithic community, comprising perhaps around 150 individuals.117 What the excavators discovered is that not only did the inhabitants of this village erect central storage facilities, including granaries and warehouses; they also employed administrative devices of some complexity to keep track of what was in them. These devices included economic archives, which were miniature precursors to the temple archives at Uruk and other later Mesopotamian cities.
这种遗址的最好例子是 Tell Sabi Abyad,由一个在叙利亚拉卡省 Balikh 山谷工作的荷兰考古学家小组进行调查。大约 8000 年前(约 公元前 6200 年),在史前美索不达米亚,一个占地一公顷的村庄被大火烧毁,它的泥墙和许多泥土内容被烤焦,从而保存下来。虽然对居民来说,这显然是一个非常糟糕的运气,但对未来的研究人员来说,这却是一个绝好的运气,因为它为我们留下了对一个新石器时代晚期社区组织的独特见解,该社区可能包括大约 150 人。117发掘者发现,这个村庄的居民不仅建立了中央储存设施,包括粮仓和仓库;他们还采用了一些复杂的管理装置来跟踪其中的内容。这些设备包括经济档案,这是乌鲁克和其他后来的美索不达米亚城市的神庙档案的微型先导。
These were not written archives: writing, as such, would not appear for another 3,000 years. What did exist were geometric tokens made of clay, of a sort that appear to have been used in many similar Neolithic villages, most likely to keep track of the allocation of particular resources.118 At Tell Sabi Abyad, miniature seals bearing engraved designs were used alongside them to stamp and mark the clay stoppers of household vessels with identifying signs.119 Perhaps most remarkably, the stoppers themselves, once removed from the vessels, were kept and archived in a special building – an office or bureau of sorts – near the centre of the village for later reference.120 Ever since these discoveries were reported in the 1990s, archaeologists have been debating in whose interests and for what purpose such ‘village bureaucracies’ functioned.
这些不是书面档案:这样的文字在 3000 年后才会出现。存在的是用粘土制成的几何符号,这种符号似乎在许多类似的新石器时代村庄中使用,很可能是为了记录特定资源的分配情况。118在 Tell Sabi Abyad,刻有的微型印章被用来在家用器皿的粘土塞子上盖上识别标志。119也许最值得注意的是,从器皿上取下的瓶塞本身被保存在村子中心附近的一个特殊建筑里 —— 一个办公室或局,供以后参考。120自从这些发现在 20 世纪 90 年代被报道以来,考古学家一直在争论这种 “村庄官僚机构” 是为了谁的利益和什么目的而运作的。
In trying to answer this question, it’s important to note that the central bureau and depot of Tell Sabi Abyad is not associated with any kind of unusually large residence, rich burials or other signs of personal status. If anything, what’s striking about the remains of this community is their uniformity: the surrounding dwellings, for instance, are all roughly equal in size, quality and surviving contents. The contents themselves suggest small family units which maintained a complex division of labour, often including tasks that would have required the co-operation of multiple households. Flocks had to be pastured, a variety of cereal crops sown, harvested and threshed, as well as flax for weaving, which was practised alongside other household crafts such as potting, bead-making, stone-carving and simple forms of metalworking. And of course there were children to raise, old people to care for, houses to build and maintain, marriages and funerals to co-ordinate, and so on.
在试图回答这个问题时,重要的是要注意到 Tell Sabi Abyad 的中央局和仓库与任何种类的异常大的住宅、丰富的墓葬或其他个人地位的标志没有关系。如果有的话,这个社区的遗迹引人注目的地方是它们的统一性:例如,周围的住宅在大小、质量和遗留的内容上都是大致相同的。这些物品本身表明,小家庭单位保持着复杂的劳动分工,通常包括需要多个家庭合作的任务。必须放牧羊群,播种、收割和脱粒各种谷物作物,以及用于纺织的亚麻,这与其他家庭手工艺如制陶、制珠、石雕和简单的金属加工形式同时进行。当然,还有孩子要抚养,老人要照顾,房屋要建造和维护,婚姻和葬礼要协调,等等。
Careful scheduling and mutual aid would have been vital for the successful completion of an annual round of productive activities, while evidence of obsidian, metals and exotic pigments indicates that villagers also interacted regularly with outsiders, no doubt through intermarriage as well as travel and trade.121 As we’ve already observed in the case of traditional Basque villages, these sorts of activity could well involve quite complicated mathematical calculations. Still, this in itself doesn’t explain why there was a need to fall back on precise systems of measurement and archiving. After all, there are untold thousands of agricultural communities across human history who juggled similarly complex combinations of tasks and responsibilities without having to create new techniques of record-keeping.
精心安排和相互帮助对于成功完成一年一度的生产活动至关重要,而黑曜石、金属和异国颜料的证据表明,村民还经常与外来者进行互动,毫无疑问是通过通婚以及旅行和贸易。121正如我们在传统的巴斯克村落中已经观察到的,这些活动很可能涉及相当复杂的数学计算。不过,这本身并不能解释为什么需要依靠精确的测量和存档系统。毕竟,在人类历史上有数不清的农业社区在处理类似的复杂任务和责任组合时,不需要创造新的记录技术。
Whatever the reason, the effect of introducing such techniques seems to have been profound for villages in prehistoric Mesopotamia and the surrounding hill country. Recall that 2,000 years separate Tell Sabi Abyad from the earliest cities, and during that long span of time village life in the Middle East underwent a series of remarkable changes. In some ways, people living in small-scale communities began to act as if they were already living in mass societies of a certain kind, even though nobody had ever seen a city. It sounds counter-intuitive – but it is what we see in the intervening centuries in the evidence of villages scattered across a large region, from southwestern Iran through much of Iraq and all the way over to the Turkish highlands. In many ways this phenomenon was another version of the kind of ‘culture areas’ or hospitality zones that we discussed in earlier chapters, but there was a different element: affinities between distant households and families seem to have been increasingly based on a principle of cultural uniformity. In a sense, then, this was the first era of the ‘global village’.122
不管是什么原因,对于史前美索不达米亚的村庄来说,引进这种技术的影响似乎是深远的, 和周围的山地。回顾一下,Tell Sabi Abyad 与最早的城市相隔 2000 年,在这漫长的时间跨度中,中东的村庄生活经历了一系列显著的变化。在某些方面,生活在小规模社区的人们开始表现得好像他们已经生活在某种大众社会中,尽管没有人见过城市。这听起来有悖于直觉 —— 但这正是我们在这几个世纪中看到的散落在大片地区的村庄的证据,从伊朗西南部到伊拉克的大部分地区,一直到土耳其高原。在许多方面,这种现象是我们在前几章中讨论的那种 “文化区” 或接待区的另一个版本,但有一个不同的因素:遥远的家庭和家族之间的亲缘关系似乎越来越基于文化统一的原则。从某种意义上说,这就是 “地球村” 的第一个时代。122
What it all looks like, in the archaeological record, is impossible to miss. We write from first-hand experience here, since one of us has conducted archaeological investigations of prehistoric villages in Iraqi Kurdistan, dating before and after the great transformation took place. What you find, in the fifth millennium BC, is the gradual disappearance from village life of most outward signs of difference or individuality, as administrative tools and other new media technologies spread across a large swathe of the Middle East. Households were now built to increasingly standard tripartite plans, and pottery, which had once been a way of expressing individual skill and creativity, now seems to have been made deliberately drab, uniform and in some cases almost standardized. Craft production in general became more mechanical, and female labour was subject to new forms of spatial control and segregation.123
在考古记录中,这一切看起来是不可能错过的。我们在这里写下第一手经验,因为我们中的一个人对伊拉克库尔德斯坦的史前村庄进行了考古调查,时间是在巨大的转变发生之前和之后。你会发现,在公元前五千年,随着行政工具和其他新媒体技术在中东大片土地上的传播,大多数差异或个性的外在迹象从村庄生活中逐渐消失。家庭现在是按照越来越标准的三方规划建造的,而陶器曾经是表达个人技能和创造力的一种方式,现在似乎被刻意制造得单调、统一,在某些情况下几乎是标准化的。手工业生产总体上变得更加机械化,女性劳动力受到了新形式的空间控制和隔离。123
In fact this entire period, lasting around 1,000 years (archaeologists call it the ‘Ubaid, after the site of Tell al-‘Ubaid in southern Iraq), was one of innovation in metallurgy, horticulture, textiles, diet and long-distance trade; but from a social vantage point, everything seems to have been done to prevent such innovations becoming markers of rank or individual distinction – in other words, to prevent the emergence of obvious differences in status, both within and between villages. Intriguingly, it is possible that we are witnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world’s first cities, and that administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening.124 To get a sense of how such small-scale bureaucracies might have worked in practice we can briefly consider again the ayllu, those Andean village associations which, as we mentioned earlier, had their own home-grown administration.
事实上,整个时期持续了大约 1000 年(考古学家根据伊拉克南部的 Tell al-‘Ubaid 遗址称其为’Ubaid'),是冶金、园艺、纺织、饮食和长途贸易的创新时期;但从社会的角度来看,一切似乎都是为了防止这些创新成为等级或个人区别的标志,换句话说,是为了防止出现明显的地位差异,包括在村庄内部和村庄之间。耐人寻味的是,我们有可能看到,在世界第一批城市出现之前的几个世纪里, 一种公开的平等意识形态的诞生,而行政工具最初的设计不是作为榨取和积累财富的手段,而正是为了防止这种事情的发生。124为了了解这种小规模的官僚机构在实践中是如何运作的,我们可以再简单考虑一下 ayllu,即那些安第斯村庄协会,正如我们前面提到的,它们有自己的本土行政机构。
Ayllu too were based on a strong principle of equality; their members literally wore uniforms, with each valley having its own traditional design of cloth. One of the ayllu ’ s main functions was to redistribute agricultural land as families grew larger or smaller, to ensure none grew richer than any other – indeed, to be a ‘rich’ household meant, in practice, to have a large number of unmarried children, hence much land, since there was no other basis for comparing wealth.125Ayllu also helped families avoid seasonal labour crunches and kept track of the number of able-bodied young men and women in each household, so as to ensure not only that none were short-handed at critical moments, but also that the aged or infirm, widows, orphans or disabled were taken care of.
Ayllu 也是基于强烈的平等原则;他们的成员实际上穿着制服,每个山谷都有自己的传统设计的布。Ayllu 的主要职能之一是随着家庭规模的扩大或缩小而重新分配农业用地,以确保没有一个家庭比其他家庭更富有 —— 事实上,成为一个 “富有” 的家庭实际上意味着有大量未婚子女,因此有很多土地,因为没有其他基础来比较财富。125阿依鲁还帮助家庭避免季节性的劳动力紧缺,并跟踪每个家庭中身体健康的年轻男女的数量,以便确保在关键时刻没有人缺人手,而且还能照顾到年老或体弱、寡妇、孤儿或残疾人。
Between households, responsibilities came down to a principle of reciprocity: records were kept and at the end of each year all outstanding credits and debts were to be cancelled out. This is where the ‘village bureaucracy’ comes in. To do that meant units of work had to be measured in a way which allowed clear resolution to the inevitable arguments that crop up in such situations – about who did what for whom, and who owed what to whom.126 Each ayllu appears to have had its own khipu strings, which were constantly knotted and re-knotted to keep track as debts were registered or cancelled out. It’s possible that khipu were invented for such purposes. In other words, although the actual administrative tools used were different, the reason for their existence was quite similar to what we envisage for the village accounting systems in prehistoric Mesopotamia, and rooted in a similarly explicit ideal of equality.127
在家庭之间,责任归结为互惠原则:保存记录,在每年年底,所有未偿还的信贷和债务都将被取消。这就是 “乡村官僚机构” 的作用。要做到这一点,意味着必须以一种方式来衡量工作单位,以便明确解决在这种情况下不可避免的争论 —— 谁为谁做了什么,谁欠了谁的什么。126每个 ayllu 似乎都有自己的 khipu 线,随着债务的登记或取消,这些线被不断地打结和重新打结以保持跟踪。有可能 khipu 就是为了这种目的而发明的。换句话说,虽然实际使用的行政工具不同,但其存在的原因与我们所设想的史前美索不达米亚的乡村会计系统非常相似,而且同样植根于一种明确的平等理想。127
Of course, the danger of such accounting procedures is that they can be turned to other purposes: the precise system of equivalence that underlies them has the potential to give almost any social arrangement, even those founded on arbitrary violence (e.g. ‘conquest’), an air of even-handedness and equity. That is why sovereignty and administration make such a potentially lethal combination, taking the equalizing effects of the latter and transforming them into tools of social domination, even tyranny.
当然,这种核算程序的危险在于,它们可以转而用于其他目的:作为其基础的精确的等价体系有可能给几乎任何社会,甚至那些建立在任意暴力(如 “征服”)基础上的安排,带来公平和公正的气息。这就是为什么主权和行政管理是一个潜在的致命组合,把后者的平等化效果转化为社会统治的工具,甚至是暴政。
Under the Inca, let’s recall, all ayllus were reduced to the status of ‘conquered women’ and khipu strings were employed to keep track of labour debts owed to the central Inca administration. Unlike the local string records, these were fixed and non-negotiable; the knots were never unravelled and retied. Here it is necessary to overcome a few myths about the Inca, who are often portrayed as the mildest of empires – even a kind of benevolent proto-socialist state. In fact, it was the pre-existing ayllu system that continued to provide social security under Inca rule. By contrast, the overarching administrative structure put in place by the Inca court was largely extractive and exploitative in nature (even if local officers of the court preferred to misrepresent it as an extension of ayllu principles): for purposes of central monitoring and recording, households were grouped into units of 10, 50, 100, 500, 1,000, 5,000 and so on, each responsible for labour obligations over and above those they already owed to their community, in a way that could only play havoc with existing allegiances, geography and communal organization.128 Corvée duties were assigned uniformly according to a rigid scale of measurement; work tasks might simply be invented if there was nothing that needed doing; scofflaws faced severe punishment.129
让我们回顾一下,在印加时期,所有的阿依鲁人都被贬为 “被征服的妇女”,而 khipu 绳被用来记录欠印加中央行政当局的劳工债务。与当地的绳索记录不同,这些绳索是固定的,没有商量的余地;绳结永远不会被解开和收起。在这里,有必要克服一些关于印加的神话,印加经常被描绘成最温和的帝国 —— 甚至是一种仁慈的原社会主义国家。事实上,在印加统治时期,正是先前存在的 ayllu 系统继续提供社会保障。相比之下,印加宫廷建立的总体行政结构在很大程度上具有榨取和剥削的性质(即使宫廷的地方官员倾向于将其歪曲为 ayllu 原则的延伸):为了中央监控和记录,家庭被分为 10、50、100、500、1,000、5,000 等单位,每个单位负责他们已经对其社区承担的劳动义务,这种方式只能对现有的忠诚、地理和社区组织造成破坏。128徭役是按照严格的衡量标准统一分配的;如果没有需要做的事情,工作任务就会被编造出来;违规者会受到严厉的惩罚。129
The results were predictable, and we can see them clearly reflected in the first-hand accounts supplied by Spanish chroniclers of the time, who took an obvious interest in Inca strategies of conquest and domination and their local workings. Community leaders became de facto state agents, and either took advantage of legalisms to get rich or tried to shield their wards and themselves if they got in to trouble. Those who were unable to meet labour debts or who tried unsuccessfully to flee or rebel, were reduced to the status of servants, retainers and concubines for Inca courts and officials.130 This new class of hereditary peons was growing rapidly at the time of Spanish conquest.
结果是可以预见的,我们可以在当时的西班牙编年史家提供的第一手资料中清楚地看到它们,他们对印加人的征服和统治战略及其在当地的运作有着明显的兴趣。社区领袖成为事实上的国家代理人,他们要么利用法律机制发财,要么在他们陷入困境时试图保护他们的被监护人和自己。那些无力偿还劳工债务或试图逃跑或反叛未果的人,则沦为印加法庭和官员的仆人、家臣和妻妾的身份。130在西班牙征服时,这个新的世袭农民阶层正在迅速壮大。
None of which is to say the Inca reputation as adept administrators is unfounded. They apparently were capable of keeping exact track of births and deaths, adjusting household numbers at yearly festivals and so on. Why, then, impose such an oddly clumsy and monolithic system on to an existing one (the ayllu) which was clearly more nuanced? It’s hard to escape the impression that in all such situations, the apparent heavy-handedness, the insistence on following the rules even when they make no sense, is really half the point. Perhaps this is simply how sovereignty manifests itself, in bureaucratic form. By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity – but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves.
这并不是说印加人作为善于管理的人的声誉,是没有根据的。他们显然能够准确地记录出生和死亡,在每年的节日里调整家庭人数,等等。那么,为什么要把这样一个奇怪的、笨拙的、单一的系统强加给一个现有的、显然更加细致的系统(ayllu)呢?很难摆脱这样的印象:在所有这些情况下,表面上的强硬,坚持遵守规则,即使这些规则毫无意义,其实是意义的一半。也许这只是主权的表现形式,以官僚主义的形式。通过忽视每个家庭、每个人的独特历史,通过将一切简化为数字,人们提供了一种公平的语言 —— 但同时也确保了总有一些人无法达到他们的配额,因此总有一些小兵、卒子或奴隶的供应。
In the Middle East, very similar things appear to have happened in later periods of history. Most famously, perhaps, the books of the Prophets in the Hebrew Bible preserve memories of powerful protests that ensued as demands for tribute drove farmers into penury, forced them to pawn their flocks and vineyards, and ultimately surrender their children into debt peonage. Or wealthy merchants and administrators took advantage of crop failures, floods, natural disasters or neighbours’ simple bad luck to offer interest-bearing loans that led to the same results. Similar complaints are recorded in China and India as well. The first establishment of bureaucratic empires is almost always accompanied by some kind of system of equivalence run amok. This is not the place to outline a history of money and debt131 – only to note that it’s no coincidence that societies like those of Uruk-period Mesopotamia were, simultaneously, commercial and bureaucratic. Both money and administration are based on similar principles of impersonal equivalence. What we wish to emphasize at this point is how frequently the most violent inequalities seem to arise, in the first instance, from such fictions of legal equality. All citizens of a city, or all worshippers of its god, or all subjects of its king were considered ultimately the same – at least in that one specific way. The same laws, the same rights, the same responsibilities applied to all of them, whether as individuals or, in later and more patriarchal times, as families under the aegis of some paterfamilias .
在中东,在后来的历史时期似乎也发生过非常类似的事情。最著名的可能是,希伯来圣经中的先知书保留了这样的记忆:由于对贡品的要求使农民陷入贫困,迫使他们当掉自己的羊群和葡萄园,并最终使他们的孩子陷入债务奴役,从而引发了强烈的抗议。或者富裕的商人和行政人员利用作物歉收、洪水、自然灾害或邻居的厄运,提供有息贷款,导致了同样的结果。在中国和印度也有类似的投诉记录。官僚帝国的首次建立几乎总是伴随着某种失控的等价交换制度。这里不是概述货币和债务历史的地方131- 只想指出,像乌鲁克时期的美索不达米亚的社会,同时是商业和官僚社会,这并不是巧合。货币和行政管理都是建立在类似的非个人等价原则之上的。在这一点上,我们希望强调的是,最激烈的不平等现象似乎首先是由这种法律平等的虚构产生的。一个城市的所有公民,或其神的所有崇拜者,或其国王的所有臣民,最终都被认为是一样的 —— 至少在这一特定方面。同样的法律、同样的权利、同样的责任适用于他们所有人,无论是作为个人,还是在后来更多的父权制时代,作为一些父权制下的家庭。
What’s important here is the fact that this equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable, which in turn allowed rulers, or their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects’ unique situations. This is of course what gives the word ‘bureaucracy’ such distasteful associations almost everywhere today. The very term evokes mechanical stupidity. But there’s no reason to believe that impersonal systems were originally, or are necessarily, stupid. If the calculations of a Bolivian ayllu or Basque council – or presumably a Neolithic village administration like that of Tell Sabi Abyad, and its urban successors in Mesopotamia – produced an obviously impossible or unreasonable result, matters could always be adjusted. As anyone knows who has spent time in a rural community, or serving on a municipal or parish council of a large city, resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair. It’s the addition of sovereign power, and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it’ that allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.
这里重要的是,这种平等可以被视为使人(以及物)可以互换,这反过来又允许统治者或他们的随从提出非个人化的要求,不考虑其臣民的独特情况。当然,这也是今天 “官僚机构” 这个词几乎无处不在的令人讨厌的原因。这个词让人想起机械的愚蠢。但是,没有理由相信非个人化的系统最初是愚蠢的,或者必然是愚蠢的。如果玻利维亚的ayllu或巴斯克的议会 —— 或者像 Tell Sabi Abyad 及其在美索不达米亚的城市继任者那样的新石器时代的乡村行政机构 —— 的计算产生了一个明显不可能或不合理的结果,事情总是可以被调整。任何在农村社区呆过的人都知道,或者在大城市的市政或教区委员会工作过的人都知道,解决这种不公平现象可能需要许多小时,甚至是数天的乏味讨论,但几乎总是会达成一个没有人认为完全不公平的解决方案。正是主权权力的增加,以及由此产生的地方执行者说 “规则就是规则,我不想听” 的能力,使官僚机制成为真正的怪胎。
Over the course of this book we have had occasion to refer to the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships. We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises. The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, much as physically running away from a difficult situation is the most basic element of the first. In fact, the earliest word for ‘freedom’ recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means ‘return to mother’ – because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom, cancelling all non-commercial debts and in some cases allowing those held as debt peons in their creditors’ households to return home to their kin.132
在本书的过程中,我们曾有机会提到三种原始的自由,那些在人类历史上大部分时间都是简单的假设:行动的自由、不服从的自由和创造或改变社会关系的自由。我们还注意到,英语中的 “自由” 一词最终来自一个日耳曼语,意思是 “朋友” —— 因为与自由人不同,奴隶不能有朋友,因为他们不能做出承诺或许诺。做出承诺的自由是我们第三种自由的最基本和最小的元素,就像从困境中逃跑是第一种自由的最基本元素。事实上,人类语言中最早的 “自由” 一词是苏美尔语 ama(r)-gi,字面意思是 “回归母亲” —— 因为苏美尔国王会定期发布债务自由令,取消所有非商业债务,在某些情况下允许那些在债权人家中作为债务人的人回到他们的亲属身边。132
One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable – in a nutshell, bureaucratized. It is one of history’s great ironies that Madame de Graffigny’s notion of the Inca state as a model of a benevolent, bureaucratic order actually derives from a misreading of the sources, if a very common one: mistaking the social benefits of local, self-organized administrative units (ayllu) for an imperial, Inca structure of command, which in reality served almost exclusively to provision the army, priesthood and administrative classes.133 Mesopotamian and later Chinese kings also tended to represent themselves, like the Egyptian nomarchs, as protectors of the weak, feeders of the hungry, solace of widows and orphans.
人们可能会问,所有人类自由的最基本要素,即作出承诺和保证从而建立关系的自由,怎么会变成它的反面:变成农奴、农奴制或永久奴隶制?我们认为,这恰恰发生在承诺变得非个人化、可转让 —— 简而言之,官僚化的时候。历史上最大的讽刺之一是,德·格拉菲尼夫人将印加国家视为仁慈的官僚秩序的典范,这实际上是源于对资料的误读,即使是非常普遍的误读:将地方性的、自我组织的行政单位(ayllu)的社会效益误认为是帝国的、印加的指挥结构,而这种结构实际上几乎只为军队、祭司和行政阶层服务。133美索不达米亚和后来的中国国王也倾向于像埃及的游牧民族一样,把自己表现为弱者的保护者、饥饿者的供养者、寡妇和孤儿的安慰者。
As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence.
我们可以说,就像金钱对承诺一样,国家官僚机构对关怀原则也是如此:在每一种情况下,我们都发现社会生活最基本的组成部分之一被数学和暴力的融合所腐蚀。
Social scientists and political philosophers have been debating the ‘origins of the state’ for well over a century. These debates are never resolved and are unlikely ever to be. At this point, at least we can understand why. Much like the search for the ‘origins of inequality’, seeking the origins of the state is little more than chasing a phantasm. As we noted at the beginning of the chapter, it never occurred to Spanish conquistadors to ask whether or not they were dealing with ‘states’ since the concept didn’t really exist at the time. The language they used, of kingdoms, empires and republics, serves just as well, and in many ways rather better.
一个多世纪以来,社会科学家和政治哲学家一直在争论 “国家的起源” 问题。这些争论从未得到解决,也不太可能得到解决。在这一点上,至少我们可以理解为什么。与寻找 “不平等的起源” 一样,寻找国家的起源也不过是在追逐一种幻觉。正如我们在本章开头所指出的,西班牙征服者从未想过他们是否在与 “国家” 打交道,因为这一概念在当时并不存在。他们使用的语言,即王国、帝国和共和国,也同样适用,而且在许多方面更适用。
Historians, of course, still speak of kingdoms, empires and republics. If social scientists have come to prefer the language of ‘states’ and ‘state formation’ it’s largely because this is taken to be more scientific – despite the lack of consistent definition. It’s not clear why. Part of the reason might be that the notions of ‘the state’ and of modern science both emerged around the same time and were to a certain degree entangled with one another. Whatever the cause, because the existing literature is so relentlessly focused on a single narrative of increasing complexity, hierarchy and state formation, it becomes very difficult to use the term ‘state’ for any other purpose.
当然,历史学家仍然在谈论王国、帝国和共和国。如果社会科学家更喜欢 “国家” 的语言, “国家的形成”,那主要是因为这被认为是更科学的 —— 尽管缺乏一致的定义。目前还不清楚原因。部分原因可能是 “国家” 的概念和现代科学的概念都是在同一时期出现的,并且在某种程度上彼此纠缠在一起。不管是什么原因,因为现有的文献是如此无情地集中在一个关于日益复杂、等级制度和国家形成的单一叙事上,所以为任何其他目的使用 “国家” 这个术语变得非常困难。
The fact that our planet is, at the present time, almost entirely covered by states obviously makes it easy to write as if such an outcome was inevitable. Yet our present situation regularly leads people to make ‘scientific’ assumptions about how we got here that have almost nothing to do with the actual data. Certain salient features of current arrangements are just projected backwards, presumed to exist once society has attained a certain degree of complexity – unless definitive evidence of their absence can be produced.
目前,我们的星球几乎完全被国家所覆盖,这一事实显然使人们很容易写出这样的结果是不可避免的。然而,我们目前的状况经常导致人们对我们如何走到这一步做出 “科学” 的假设,而这些假设与实际数据几乎毫无关系。目前安排的某些突出特点只是向后推算,一旦社会达到一定的复杂程度,就会被推定为存在 —— 除非能拿出明确的证据证明它们的存在。
For example, it is often simply assumed that states begin when certain key functions of government – military, administrative and judicial – pass into the hands of full-time specialists. This makes sense if you accept the narrative that an agricultural surplus ‘freed up’ a significant portion of the population from the onerous responsibility of securing adequate amounts of food: a story that suggests the beginning of a process that would lead to our current global division of labour. Early states might have used this surplus largely to support full-time bureaucrats, priests, soldiers and the like, but – we are always reminded – its existence also allowed for full-time sculptors, poets and astronomers.
例如,人们常常简单地认为,当政府的某些关键职能 —— 军事、行政和司法 —— 转到全职专家手中时,国家就开始了。如果你接受这样的说法,即农业盈余将很大一部分人口从确保足够数量的食物的繁重责任中 “解放” 出来:这个故事表明,一个导致我们目前全球分工的过程开始了。早期的国家可能将这种盈余主要用于支持全职的官僚、牧师、士兵等,但是 —— 我们总是被提醒 —— 它的存在也允许全职的雕塑家、诗人和天文学家。
It’s a compelling story. It is also quite true when applied to our present-day situation (at least, only a small percentage of us are now involved in the production and distribution of foodstuffs). However, almost none of the regimes we’ve been considering in this chapter were actually staffed by full-time specialists. Most obviously, none seem to have had a standing army. Warfare was largely a business for the agricultural off-season. Priests and judges rarely worked full-time either; in fact, most government institutions in Old Kingdom Egypt, Shang China, Early Dynastic Mesopotamia or for that matter classical Athens were staffed by a rotating workforce whose members had other lives as managers of rural estates, traders, builders or any number of different occupations.134
这是一个令人信服的故事。当应用于我们今天的情况时,它也是相当正确的(至少,我们现在只有一小部分人参与食品的生产和销售)。然而,我们在本章中所考虑的制度中,几乎没有一个是真正由全职专家组成的。最明显的是,似乎没有一个政权拥有一支常备军。战争在很大程度上是农业淡季的一项业务。 祭司和法官也很少全职工作;事实上,旧王国埃及、商代中国、早期美索不达米亚或古典雅典的大多数政府机构的工作人员都是轮流工作的,其成员都有其他生活,如农村庄园的经理、商人、建筑工人或任何不同的职业。134
One could go further. It’s not clear to what degree many of these ‘early states’ were themselves largely seasonal phenomena (recall that, at least as far back as the Ice Age, seasonal gatherings could be stages for the performance of something that looks to us a bit like kingship; rulers held court only during certain periods of the year; and some clans or warrior societies were given state-like police powers only during the winter months).135 Like warfare, the business of government tended to concentrate strongly upon certain times of year: there were months full of building projects, pageants, festivals, census-taking, oaths of allegiance, trials and spectacular executions; and other times when a king’s subjects (and sometimes even the king himself) scattered to attend to the more urgent needs of planting, harvesting and pasturage. This doesn’t mean these kingdoms weren’t real: they were capable of mobilizing, or for that matter killing and maiming, thousands of human beings. It just means that their reality was, in effect, sporadic. They appeared and then dissolved away.
人们可以走得更远。目前还不清楚这些 “早期国家” 在多大程度上本身就是一种季节性现象(回顾一下,至少早在冰河时代,季节性集会就可以成为履行某种在我们看来有点像王权的东西的阶段;统治者只在一年中的某些时期上朝;一些部族或战士社团只在冬季被赋予类似国家的警察权力)。135与战争一样,政府事务往往集中在一年中的某些时候:有几个月充满了建筑项目、庆典、节日、人口普查、宣誓效忠、审判和壮观的处决;还有一些时候,国王的臣民(有时甚至是国王本人)分散开来,处理种植、收获和放牧等更紧急的需求。这并不意味着这些王国不是真实的:他们能够动员,或为此而杀害和残害成千上万的人。这只是意味着他们的现实,实际上是零星的。它们出现了,然后又消散了。
Could it be that, in the same way that play farming – our term for those loose and flexible methods of cultivation which leave people free to pursue any number of other seasonal activities – turned into more serious agriculture, play kingdoms began to take on more substance as well? The evidence from Egypt might be interpreted along these lines. But it’s also possible that both these processes, when they did happen, were ultimately driven by something else, such as the emergence of patriarchal relations and the decline of women’s power within the household. Surely these are the kinds of questions we should be asking. Ethnography also teaches us that kings are rarely content with the idea of being a sporadic presence in most of their subjects’ lives. Even rulers of kingdoms that nobody would describe as a state, like the Shilluk reth or rulers of minor principalities in Java or Madagascar, would try to insert themselves into the rhythms of ordinary social life by insisting that no one can swear an oath, or marry, or even greet one another without invoking their name. In this manner, the king would become the necessary means by which his subjects established relations with each other, in much the same way as later heads of state would insist on putting their faces on money.
会不会是,就像游猎农业(play farming) —— 我们对那些让人们自由地追求任何其他季节性活动的宽松而灵活的耕作方法的称呼 —— 变成了更严肃的农业一样,游猎王国(play kindoms)也开始有了更多的内容?来自埃及的证据可能是按照这些思路来解释的。但也有可能这两个过程,当它们确实发生时,最终是由其他东西驱动的,如父权关系的出现和妇女在家庭中权力的下降。当然,这些都是我们应该问的问题。人种学还告诉我们,国王很少满足于在其臣民的大部分生活中作为一个零星的存在的想法。即使是那些没有人会形容为国家的王国的统治者,如 Shilluk reth 或爪哇或马达加斯加的小公国的统治者,也会试图将自己插入普通社会生活的节奏中,坚持没有人可以宣誓,或结婚,甚至不援引他们的名字就相互问候。通过这种方式,国王将成为他的臣民相互建立关系的必要手段,就像后来的国家元首坚持在金钱上印上他们的脸一样。
In 1852 the Wesleyan minister and missionary Richard B. Lyth described how in the Fijian kingdom of Cakaudrove there was a daily rule of absolute silence at sunrise. Then the king’s herald would proclaim that he was about to chew his kava root, whereon all his subjects shouted, ‘Chew it!’ This was followed by a thunderous roar when the ritual was completed. The ruler was the Sun, who gave both life and order to his people. He recreated the universe each day. In fact, most scholars nowadays insist this king wasn’t even a king, but merely the head of a ‘confederacy of chiefdoms’ who ruled over perhaps a few thousand people. Such cosmic claims are regularly made in royal ritual almost everywhere in the world, and their grandeur seems to bear almost no relation to a ruler’s actual power (as in their ability to make anyone do anything they don’t want to do). If ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.136
1852 年,卫斯理牧师和传教士 Richard B·Lyth 描述了在斐济的 Cakaudrove 王国,每天日出时有一个绝对安静的规则。然后国王的传令官会宣布他即将咀嚼他的卡瓦根,这时所有的臣民都会大喊:“咀嚼它!” 仪式完成后,随之而来的是雷鸣般的吼声。统治者是太阳,他给了他的人民生命和秩序。他每天都在重新创造宇宙。事实上,现在大多数学者坚持认为这个国王甚至不是一个国王,而只是一个 “首领联盟” 的首领,他也许统治着几千人。世界上几乎所有地方的王室仪式都经常提出这样的宇宙主张,而它们的宏伟似乎与统治者的实际权力几乎没有关系(如他们有能力让任何人做他们不想做的事情)。如果 “国家” 有什么意义的话,它指的正是所有这种说法背后的极权主义冲动,即有效地使仪式永远持续的愿望。136
Monuments like the Egyptian pyramids seem to have served a similar purpose. They were attempts to make a certain kind of power seem eternal – the kind that only really manifested itself in those particular months when pyramid construction was under way. Inscriptions or objects designed to project an image of cosmic power – palaces, mausoleums, lavish stelae with godlike figures announcing laws or boasting of their conquests – are precisely the ones most likely to endure, thereby forming the core of the world’s major heritage sites and museum collections today. Such is their power that even now we risk falling under their spell. We don’t really know how seriously to take them. After all, the Fijian subjects of the King of Cakaudrove must at least have been willing to play along with the daily sunrise ritual, since he lacked much in the way of means to compel them. Yet rulers such as Sargon the Great of Akkad or the First Emperor of China had many such means at their disposal, and as a result we can say even less about what their subjects really made of their more grandiose claims.137
像埃及金字塔这样的纪念碑似乎也有类似的目的。它们试图使某种力量看起来是永恒的 —— 那种只有在金字塔建造的那些特定月份才真正体现出来的力量。旨在投射宇宙权力形象的铭文或物品 —— 宫殿、陵墓、带有宣布法律或夸耀其征服的神像的豪华石碑 —— 正是最有可能经久不衰的,从而形成今天世界主要遗产地和博物馆收藏的核心。它们的力量如此之大,以至于即使现在我们也有可能陷入它们的魔咒。我们真的不知道该如何认真对待它们。毕竟,卡考德罗夫国王的斐济臣民至少必须愿意配合每天的日出仪式,因为他没有什么手段来强迫他们。然而,像阿卡德的萨尔贡大帝或中国的秦始皇这样的统治者却有很多这样的手段,因此,我们更不能说他们的臣民对他们更宏大的要求到底做了什么。137
To understand the realities of power, whether in modern or ancient societies, is to acknowledge this gap between what elites claim they can do and what they are actually able to do. As the sociologist Philip Abrams pointed out long ago, failure to make this distinction has led social scientists up countless blind alleys, because the state is ‘not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.’ To understand the latter, he argued, we must attend to ‘the senses in which the state does not exist rather than to those in which it does’.138 We can now see that these points apply just as forcefully to ancient political regimes as they do to modern ones – if not more so.
要理解权力的现实,无论是在现代社会还是古代社会,都要承认精英们声称他们能做什么和他们实际能做什么之间的这种差距。正如社会学家 Philip Abrams 很久以前指出的那样,如果不作出这种区分,就会使社会科学家走上无数条盲道,因为国家 “不是站在政治实践的面具后面的现实”。它本身就是 “阻碍我们看到政治实践真相的面具”。他认为,为了理解后者,我们必须关注 “国家不存在的感觉,而不是它存在的感觉”。138我们现在可以看到,这些观点同样有力地适用于古代的政治制度和现代的政治制度 —— 如果不是更加有力的话。
An origin for ‘the state’ has long been sought in such diverse places as ancient Egypt, Inca Peru and Shang China, but what we now regard as states turn out not to be a constant of history at all; not the result of a long evolutionary process that began in the Bronze Age, but rather a confluence of three political forms – sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition – that have different origins. Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together, but this time with a notion that the power of kings is held by an entity called ‘the people’ (or ‘the nation’), that bureaucracies exist for the benefit of said ‘people’, and in which a variation on old, aristocratic contests and prizes has come to be relabelled as ‘democracy’, most often in the form of national elections. There was nothing inevitable about it. If proof of that were required, we need only observe how much this particular arrangement is currently coming apart. As we noted, there are now planetary bureaucracies (public and private, ranging from the IMF and WTO to J. P. Morgan Chase and various credit-rating agencies) without anything that resembles a corresponding principle of global sovereignty or global field of competitive politics; and everything from cryptocurrencies to private security agencies, undermining the sovereignty of states.
长期以来,人们一直在古埃及、秘鲁印加和中国商朝等不同地方寻找 “国家” 的起源,但我们现在所认为的国家原来根本不是历史的常态;不是始于青铜时代的漫长进化过程的结果,而是三种政治形式 —— 主权、行政和魅力竞争 —— 的汇合,它们有着不同的起源。现代国家只是这三种统治原则碰巧走到一起的一种方式,但这一次的概念是,国王的权力由一个叫做 “人民”(或 “国家”)的实体掌握,官僚机构的存在是为了上述 “人民” 的利益,而在这种情况下,古老的、贵族式的竞争和奖励的变体已经被重新命名为 “民主”,最常见的形式是国家选举。这并没有什么不可避免的。如果需要证明这一点,我们只需要观察一下这种特殊的安排目前是如何分崩离析的。正如我们所指出的,现在有地球上的官僚机构(公共和私人,从国际货币基金组织和世贸组织到摩根大通和各种信用评级机构),没有任何类似于全球主权或全球竞争性政治领域的相应原则;以及从加密货币到私人安全机构的一切,破坏了国家的主权。
If anything is clear by now it’s this. Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart. Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself.
如果现在有什么是清楚的,那就是这个。我们曾经认为 “文明” 和 “国家” 是连在一起的实体,是作为一个历史包传给我们的(接受或不接受,永远),现在的历史表明,这些术语实际上指的是复杂的混合元素,它们有完全不同的起源,目前正处于渐行渐远的过程。这样看来,重新思考社会演变的基本前提,就是重新思考政治本身的概念。
On reflection, it’s odd that the term ‘civilization’ – one we’ve not discussed much until now – ever came to be used this way in the first place. When people talk about ‘early civilizations’ they are mostly referring to those very same societies we’ve been describing in this chapter and their direct successors: Pharaonic Egypt, Inca Peru, Aztec Mexico, Han China, Imperial Rome, ancient Greece, or others of a certain scale and monumentality. All these were deeply stratified societies, held together mostly by authoritarian government, violence and the radical subordination of women. Sacrifice, as we’ve seen, is the shadow lurking behind this concept of civilization: the sacrifice of our three basic freedoms, and of life itself, for the sake of something always out of reach – whether that be an ideal of world order, the Mandate of Heaven or blessings from insatiable gods. Is it any wonder that in some circles the very idea of ‘civilization’ has fallen into disrepute? Something very basic has gone wrong here.
仔细想想,“文明” 这个词 —— 直到现在我们还没怎么讨论过 —— 一开始就被这样使用是很奇怪的。当人们谈论 “早期文明” 时,他们大多指的是我们在本章中描述的那些社会以及它们的直接继承者。法老埃及、秘鲁印加、墨西哥阿兹特克、中国汉族、罗马帝国、古希腊,或其他具有一定规模和纪念意义的社会。所有这些都是分层很深的社会,主要靠专制政府、暴力和妇女的极端从属地位来维持。正如我们所看到的,牺牲是潜伏在这个文明概念背后的阴影:牺牲我们的三个基本自由,以及生命本身,为了一些总是遥不可及的东西 —— 无论是世界秩序的理想、天命还是贪得无厌的神明的祝福。难怪在某些圈子里,“文明” 这个概念已经变得不光彩了?这里有一些非常基本的东西出了问题。
One problem is that we’ve come to assume that ‘civilization’ refers, in origin, simply to the habit of living in cities. Cities, in turn, were thought to imply states. But as we’ve seen, that is not the case historically, or even etymologically.139 The word ‘civilization’ derives from Latin civilis, which actually refers to those qualities of political wisdom and mutual aid that permit societies to organize themselves through voluntary coalition. In other words, it originally meant the type of qualities exhibited by Andean ayllu associations or Basque villages, rather than Inca courtiers or Shang dynasts. If mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others are the kind of things that really go to make civilizations, then this true history of civilization is only just starting to be written.
一个问题是,我们已经开始假定,“文明” 在起源上仅仅是指生活在城市的习惯。反过来,城市又被认为意味着国家。但正如我们所看到的,在历史上,甚至在词源上都不是这样的。139“文明” 一词来源于拉丁文 civilis,它实际上是指那些允许社会通过自愿联合组织起来的政治智慧和互助的品质。换句话说,它最初指的是安第斯山脉 ayllu 协会或巴斯克村庄所表现出的那种品质,而不是印加朝臣或商朝。如果互助、社会合作、公民行动主义、好客或仅仅是对他人的关怀是真正创造文明的那种东西,那么这部真正的文明史才刚刚开始被书写。
As we saw in Chapter Five, Marcel Mauss took some initial, furtive steps in that direction but was largely ignored; and, as he anticipated, such a history might well begin with those geographically expansive ‘culture areas’ or ‘interaction spheres’ that archaeologists can now trace back into periods far earlier than kingdoms or empires, or even cities. As we’ve seen, physical evidence left behind by common forms of domestic life, ritual and hospitality shows us this deep history of civilization. In some ways it’s much more inspiring than monuments. Arguably, the most important findings of modern archaeology are precisely these vibrant and far-flung networks of kinship and commerce, where those who rely largely on speculation have expected to find only backward and isolated ‘tribes’.
正如我们在第五章中所看到的,马塞尔·莫斯在这个方向上迈出了一些初步的、大胆的步伐,但在很大程度上被忽视了;而且,正如他所预料的,这样的历史很可能从那些地理上广阔的 “文化区” 或 “互动领域” 开始,考古学家现在可以追溯到远早于王国或帝国,甚至是城市的时期。正如我们所看到的,普通形式的家庭生活、仪式和款待所留下的实物证据向我们展示了这种深刻的文明历史。在某些方面,它比纪念碑更具有启发性。可以说,现代考古学最重要的发现正是这些充满活力和遥远的亲属关系和商业网络,而那些主要依靠猜测的人预计在这里只能找到落后和孤立的 “部落”。
As we’ve been showing throughout this book, in all parts of the world small communities formed civilizations in that true sense of extended moral communities. Without permanent kings, bureaucrats or standing armies they fostered the growth of mathematical and calendrical knowledge. In some regions they pioneered metallurgy, the cultivation of olives, vines and date palms, or the invention of leavened bread and wheat beer; in others they domesticated maize and learned to extract poisons, medicines and mind-altering substances from plants. Civilizations, in this true sense, developed the major textile technologies applied to fabrics and basketry, the potter’s wheel, stone industries and beadwork, the sail and maritime navigation, and so on.
正如我们在本书中所展示的那样,在世界各地,小型社区形成了真正意义上的扩展道德社区的文明。没有永久的国王、官僚或常备军,他们促进了数学和历法知识的发展。在一些地区,他们开创了冶金学,种植橄榄、葡萄和枣树,或发明了发酵面包和小麦啤酒;在其他地区,他们驯化了玉米,并学会了从植物中提取毒药、药物和改变精神的物质。在这个真正意义上的文明,发展了应用于织物和篮子的主要纺织技术、陶轮、石材工业和珠饰、风帆和海上航行,等等。
A moment’s reflection shows that women, their work, their concerns and innovations are at the core of this more accurate understanding of civilization. As we saw in earlier chapters, tracing the place of women in societies without writing often means using clues left, quite literally, in the fabric of material culture, such as painted ceramics that mimic both textile designs and female bodies in their forms and elaborate decorative structures. To take just two examples, it’s hard to believe that the kind of complex mathematical knowledge displayed in early Mesopotamian cuneiform documents or in the layout of Peru’s Chavín temples sprang fully formed from the mind of a male scribe or sculptor, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Far more likely, these represent knowledge accumulated in earlier times through concrete practices such as the solid geometry and applied calculus of weaving or beadwork.140 What until now has passed for ‘civilization’ might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation – by men, etching their claims in stone – of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.
稍微思考一下就会发现,妇女、她们的工作、她们的关注和创新是这种对文明更准确理解的核心。正如我们在前几章中所看到的,追踪妇女在没有文字的社会中的地位往往意味着利用物质文化结构中留下的线索,比如在形式上模仿纺织品设计和女性身体的彩绘陶瓷,以及精心制作的装饰结构。仅举两个例子,很难相信美索不达米亚早期楔形文字文件或秘鲁查韦恩神庙的布局中所展示的那种复杂的数学知识是由男性抄写员或雕塑家的头脑中完全形成的,就像雅典娜来自宙斯的头一样。更有可能的是,这些代表了早期通过具体实践积累的知识,如编织或串珠的实体几何学和应用微积分。140到目前为止,被认为是 “文明” 的东西实际上可能不过是一种性别化的占有 —— 由男人将他们的主张刻在石头上 —— 一些以妇女为中心的早期知识体系。
We began this chapter by noting how often the expansion of ambitious polities, and the concentration of power in a few hands, was accompanied by the marginalization of women, if not their violent subordination. This seems to be true not just of second-order regimes like Aztec Mexico and Old Kingdom Egypt but also of first-order ones like Chavín de Huántar. But what about cases where, even as societies scaled up and also took on more centralized forms of government, women and their concerns remained at the core of things? Do any such exist in history? This brings us to our final example: Minoan Crete.
我们在本章开始时指出,雄心勃勃的政体的扩张,以及权力集中在少数人手中,往往伴随着妇女的边缘化,甚至是妇女的暴力从属。这似乎不仅适用于二阶政权,如墨西哥阿兹特克人和埃及旧王国,也适用于一阶政权,如 Chavín de Huántar。但是,即使社会规模扩大,并采取更集中的政府形式,妇女和她们关心的问题仍然处于事情的核心呢?历史上是否存在这样的情况?这就给我们带来了最后一个例子。米诺斯克里特岛。
Whatever was happening during the Bronze Age on Crete, the largest and most southerly of the Aegean islands, it clearly doesn’t quite fit the scholarly playbook of ‘state formation’. Yet the remains of what has come to be called Minoan society are too dramatic, too impressive and too close to the heart of Europe (and what was to become the classical world) to be sidelined or ignored. Indeed, in the 1970s the renowned archaeologist Colin Renfrew chose nothing less than The Emergence of Civilisation as the title of his important book on the prehistory of the Aegean, to the eternal confusion and annoyance of archaeologists working anywhere else.141 Despite this high profile, and more than a century of intense fieldwork, Minoan Crete remains a kind of beautiful irritant for archaeological theory, and frankly a source of puzzlement to anyone coming at the topic from outside.
无论克里特岛这个爱琴海最大最南端的岛屿在青铜时代发生了什么,它显然都不太符合学术界关于 “国家形成” 的剧本。然而,被称为米诺斯社会的遗迹太引人注目,太令人印象深刻,太接近欧洲(以及后来的古典世界)的中心,不能被搁置或忽视。事实上,在 20 世纪 70 年代,著名的考古学家科林·伦弗鲁(Colin Renfrew)选择了“文明的出现”作为他关于爱琴海史前史的重要著作的标题,这让在其他地方工作的考古学家永远感到困惑和恼火。141尽管有如此高的知名度,以及一个多世纪以来紧张的田野工作,米诺斯克里特岛仍然是考古学理论的一种美丽的刺激物,坦率地说,对任何从外面来的人来说,都是一个困惑的来源。
Much of our knowledge comes from the metropolis of Knossos, as well as other major centres at Phaestos, Malia and Zakros, which are usually described as ‘palatial societies’ that existed between 1700 and 1450 BC (the Neopalatial or ‘New Palace’ period).142 Certainly, they were very impressive places at this time. Knossos, thought to have had a population of about 25,000,143 in many ways resembles similar cities in other parts of the eastern Mediterranean, centring as it does on large palace complexes replete with industrial quarters and storage facilities, and a system of writing on clay tablets (‘Linear A’) which, frustratingly, has never been deciphered. The problem is that, unlike palatial societies of roughly the same age – such as those of Zimri-Lim at Mari on the Syrian Euphrates, or in Hittite Anatolia to the north, or Egypt – there is simply no clear evidence of monarchy on Minoan Crete.144
我们的大部分知识来自于克诺索斯这个大都市,以及位于 Phaestos、Malia 和 Zakros 的其他主要中心,它们通常被描述为存在于公元前 1700 年至 1450 年的 “宫殿社会”(Neopalatial 或 “新宫殿” 时期)。142当然,它们在这个时期是非常令人印象深刻的地方。克诺索斯,被认为有大约 25,000 的人口。143它在许多方面与地中海东部其他地区的类似城市相似,都是以大型宫殿群为中心,并配有工业区和仓储设施,还有一套在泥板上书写的系统(“线性 A”),令人沮丧的是,该系统从未被破译过。问题是,与大约同一时代的宫殿社会不同 —— 例如叙利亚幼发拉底河畔马里的 Zimri-Lim,或北部安纳托利亚的赫梯,或埃及 —— 米诺斯克里特岛上根本没有明确的君主制证据。144
It’s not for lack of material. We might not be able to read the writing, but Crete and the nearby island of Thera (Santorini) – where a bed of volcanic ash preserves the Minoan town of Akrotiri in splendid detail – actually furnish us with one of the most extensive bodies of pictorial art from the Bronze Age world: not just frescoes, but also ivories and detailed engravings on seals and jewellery.145 By far the most frequent depictions of authority figures in Minoan art show adult women in boldly patterned skirts that extend over their shoulders but are open at the chest.146 Women are regularly depicted at a larger scale than men, a sign of political superiority in the visual traditions of all neighbouring lands. They hold symbols of command, like the staff-wielding ‘Mother of Mountains’ who appears on seal impressions from a major shrine at Knossos; they perform fertility rites before horned altars, sit on thrones, meet together in assemblies with no male presiding and appear flanked by supernatural creatures and dangerous animals.147 Most male depictions, on the other hand, are either of scantily clad or naked athletes (no women are depicted naked in Minoan art); or show men bringing tribute and adopting poses of subservience before female dignitaries. All this is without parallel in the highly patriarchal societies of Syria, Lebanon, Anatolia and Egypt (all regions that Cretans of the time were familiar with, since they visited them as traders and diplomats).
这并不是因为缺乏材料。我们可能无法阅读文字,但克里特岛和附近的塞拉岛(圣托里尼岛) —— 那里的火山灰床保留了米诺斯镇阿克罗蒂里的辉煌细节 —— 实际上为我们提供了青铜时代世界中最广泛的图像艺术之一:不仅有壁画,还有象牙和印章及珠宝上的详细雕刻图案。145到目前为止,米诺斯艺术中对权威人物最常见的描绘是成年女性身着图案大胆的裙子,裙子延伸到肩膀上,但胸部是敞开的。146女性被描绘成比男性更大的比例,这在所有邻国的视觉传统中是政治优势的标志。她们持有指挥权的象征,比如在克诺索斯一个主要神殿的印记上出现的挥舞着法杖的 “山之母”;她们在有角的祭坛前举行生育仪式,坐在宝座上,在没有男性主持的集会中一起开会,并在超自然生物和危险动物的两侧出现。147另一方面,大多数男性描写要么是衣着暴露的运动员,要么是赤身裸体的运动员(米诺斯艺术中没有女性的裸体描写);或者表现男性带着贡品,在女性权贵面前摆出屈从的姿势。所有这些在叙利亚、黎巴嫩、安纳托利亚和埃及(当时的克里特人熟悉的所有地区,因为他们作为商人和外交官访问过这些地区)的高度父权制社会中是没有的。
Scholarly interpretations of Minoan palatial art, with its array of powerful females, are somewhat perplexing. Most follow Arthur Evans, the early-twentieth-century excavator of Knossos, in identifying such figures as goddesses, or priestesses wielding no earthly power – almost as though they have no connection to the real world.148 They tend to come up in the ‘religion and ritual’ sections of books on Aegean art and archaeology as opposed to ‘politics’, ‘economics’ or ‘social structure’ – politics, in particular, being reconstructed with almost no reference to the art at all. Others simply avoid the issue altogether, describing Minoan political life as clearly different, but ultimately impenetrable (a gendered sentiment if ever there was one). Would this keep happening if these were images of men in positions of authority? Unlikely, since the same scholars usually have no trouble identifying similar scenes that involve males – painted on the walls of Egyptian tombs, for example – or even actual representations of Keftiu (Cretans) bringing tribute to powerful Egyptian men as reflections of real power relations.
学者们对米诺斯宫殿艺术的解释,以及其中一系列强大的女性形象,都有些令人困惑。大多数人都追随二十世纪初克诺索斯的发掘者阿瑟·埃文斯,将这些人物认定为女神,或者是没有世俗权力的女祭司 —— 几乎就像她们与现实世界没有关系一样。148他们往往出现在爱琴海艺术和考古书籍的 “宗教和仪式” 部分,而不是 “政治”、“经济” 或 “社会结构” —— 尤其是政治,在重建时几乎完全没有提到艺术。还有人干脆完全回避这个问题,将米诺斯的政治生活描述为明显的不同,但最终是不可捉摸的(如果有的话,这是一种性别化的情绪)。如果这些是处于权力地位的男人的图像,这种情况会一直发生吗?不太可能,因为同样的学者通常不难发现涉及男性的类似场景 —— 例如,画在埃及古墓墙上的场景 —— 甚至是 Keftiu(克里特人)向有权势的埃及人进贡的实际表现,作为真实权力关系的反映。
Another puzzling bit of evidence is the nature of the wares that Minoan merchants imported from abroad. Minoans were a trading people, and the traders appear to have been mostly men. But starting in the Proto-palatial period, what they brought home from overseas had a distinctively female flavour. Egyptian sistra, cosmetic jars, figures of nursing mothers and scarab amulets do not come from the male-dominated sphere of courtly culture but the rituals of non-royal Egyptian women and the gynocentric rites of Hathor. Hathor was celebrated outside Egypt too, in temples near the Sinai turquoise mines and in maritime ports, where the horned goddess morphed into a protector of travellers. One such port was Byblos on the Lebanese coast, where an assemblage of cosmetics and amulets – almost identical to those from early Cretan tombs – was found buried as offerings in a temple. Most likely, such objects travelled along with women’s cults, perhaps like the much later cults of Isis, tracking the ‘official’ trade of male elites. The concentration of these items within prestigious Cretan tholos tombs in the period just before the formation of palaces (another of those neglected ‘proto-periods’) suggests, at the very least, that women occupied the demand side of such long-distance exchanges.149
另一个令人费解的证据是米诺斯商人从国外进口的物品的性质。米诺斯人是一个贸易民族,而商人似乎大多是男性。但从原宫殿时代开始,他们从海外带回的东西具有明显的女性色彩。埃及人的西施、化妆品罐、哺乳期母亲的形象和刀疤护身符都不是来自宫廷文化中男性主导的领域,而是来自埃及非王室妇女的仪式和以女性为中心的哈托尔的仪式。哈托尔在埃及以外的地方也得到了庆祝,在西奈半岛绿松石矿附近的寺庙和海港,有角的女神在那里变成了旅行者的保护者。黎巴嫩海岸的比布鲁斯就是这样一个港口,在那里发现了一批化妆品和护身符 —— 与克里特早期墓葬中的化妆品和护身符几乎相同 —— 作为祭品被埋在一个寺庙中。最有可能的是,这些物品与妇女崇拜一起旅行,也许就像后来的伊希斯崇拜一样,追踪男性精英的 “官方” 贸易。这些物品集中在著名的克里特Tholos墓中,而这一时期正好是宫殿形成之前(另一个被忽视的 “原生期”),这至少表明,妇女占据了这种长距离交流的需求方。149
Again, this was most definitely not the case elsewhere. To throw things into relief, let’s briefly consider the slightly later palaces of mainland Greece.
同样,其他地方的情况也绝对不是这样的。为了说明问题,让我们简单考虑一下稍晚的希腊大陆的宫殿。
Cretan palaces were unfortified, and Minoan art makes almost no reference to war, dwelling instead on scenes of play and attention to creature comforts. All this is in marked contrast to what was happening on the Greek mainland. Walled citadels arose at Mycenae, Pylos and Tiryns around 1400 BC, and before long their rulers launched a successful takeover of Crete, occupying Knossos and assuming control of its hinterland. Compared to Knossos or Phaistos, their residences appear little more than hill forts, perched on key passes in the Peloponnese and surrounded by modest hamlets. Mycenae, the biggest, had a population of around 6,000. This is not surprising, since the palace societies of the mainland don’t arise from pre-existing cities but from warrior aristocracies that produced the earlier Shaft Graves of Mycenae, with their haunting gold death masks and weaponry inlaid with scenes of male fighters and hunting bands.150
克里特人的宫殿是不设防的,米诺斯艺术几乎没有提到战争,而是停留在游戏场景和对生物舒适性的关注上。所有这些都与希腊大陆上发生的事情形成了明显的对比。公元前 1400 年左右,迈锡尼、皮洛斯和蒂林斯出现了城墙,不久,他们的统治者成功地接管了克里特岛,占领了克诺索斯并控制了其腹地。与克诺索斯或菲斯托斯相比,他们的住所似乎不过是山丘堡垒,坐落在伯罗奔尼撒半岛的重要通道上,周围是一些小村庄。最大的迈锡尼有大约 6,000 个人口。这并不奇怪,因为大陆的宫殿社会并不是从先前存在的,而是从产生早期迈锡尼竖井墓的战士贵族中产生的,他们的黄金死亡面具和武器上镶嵌着男性战士和狩猎队的场景,令人魂牵梦绕。150
On to this institutional foundation – the warrior band leader and his hunting retinue – were soon added courtly finery borrowed mainly from the Cretan palaces, and a script (Linear B) adapted to write the Greek language for administration. Analysis of the Linear B tablets suggests that just a handful of literate officers did most of the administrative work themselves, personally inspecting crops and livestock, gathering taxes, distributing raw materials to artisans and supplying provisions for festivals. It was all rather limited and small-scale,151 and a Mycenaean wanax (the ruler or overlord) would have exercised little true sovereignty beyond his citadel, making do with seasonal tax raids on a surrounding populace whose lives otherwise went on beyond the scope of royal surveillance.152
在这一制度基础上,很快又增加了主要从克里特宫殿借来的宫廷装饰品,以及为行政管理而改写的希腊语文字(线性 B)。对 Linear B 碑文的分析表明,只有少数有文化的官员自己做了大部分的行政工作,他们亲自检查作物和牲畜,征收税款,向工匠分发原材料,并为节日提供食品。这都是相当有限和小规模的。151迈锡尼人的 Wanax(统治者或霸主)在其堡垒之外几乎没有行使过真正的主权,只能对周围的民众进行季节性的税收突击,否则他们的生活就会超出皇家的监控范围。152
These Mycenaean overlords held court in a megaron or great hall, a relatively well-preserved example of which exists at Pylos. Early archaeologists were being a bit fanciful when they imagined this actually to be the palace of the Homeric king Nestor, but there is no doubt one of Homer’s kings would have felt quite at home here. The megaron centred on a huge hearth, open to the sky; the remainder of the space, including the throne, was most likely cast in shadow. The walls bear frescoes showing a bull led to slaughter and a bard playing the lyre. The wanax, although not depicted, is clearly the focus of these processional scenes, which converge on his throne.153
这些迈锡尼的统治者在一个大殿或大礼堂里开庭,在皮洛斯有一个保存相对完好的例子。早期的考古学家们把这里想象成荷马史诗中国王内斯特的宫殿,这有点胡思乱想,但毫无疑问,荷马史诗中的一位国王在这里会感到非常自在。大殿以一个巨大的炉灶为中心,向天空敞开;其余的空间,包括王座,很可能是在阴影中。墙壁上的壁画显示了一头被引向屠宰的公牛和一个弹琴的吟游诗人。虽然没有描绘Wanax,但他显然是这些游行场景的焦点,这些场景都集中在他的宝座上。153
We can contrast this with the ‘Throne Room’ of Knossos on Crete, identified as such by Arthur Evans. In this case the purported throne faces an open space, surrounded by stone benches symmetrically arranged in rows so the assembled groups could sit in comfort for long periods, each visible to all the others. Nearby was a stepped bathing chamber. There are many such ‘lustral basins’ (as Evans called them) in Minoan houses and palaces. Archaeologists puzzled for decades over their function, until at Akrotiri one such was found directly under a painted scene of a female initiation ceremony most likely linked to menstruation.154 In fact, on purely architectural grounds, and notwithstanding Evans’s rather desperate insistence that it ‘seems better adapted for a man’, the centrepiece of the Throne Room may be quite reasonably understood not as the seat of a male monarch but rather that of a council head, and its occupants more likely a succession of female councillors.
我们可以将其与阿瑟·埃文斯认定的克里特岛克诺索斯的 “王座室” 进行对比。在这种情况下,所谓的王座面对的是一个开放的空间,周围是一排排对称排列的石凳,所以聚集在一起的人群可以舒适地坐很长时间,每个人都可以看到其他的人。附近有一个阶梯式的沐浴室。在米诺斯的房屋和宫殿中,有许多这样的 “光泽盆地”(埃文斯称之为光泽盆地)。考古学家对它们的功能困惑了几十年,直到在阿克罗蒂里发现了一个这样的盆地,它直接位于一个很可能与月经有关的女性启动仪式的绘画场景之下。154事实上,从纯粹的建筑学角度来看,尽管埃文斯相当绝望地坚持认为 “似乎更适合男人”,但王座厅的中心部分,可以很合理地理解为不是男性君主的座位,而是议会首脑的座位,而其居住者更可能是一连串的女性议员。
Pretty much all the available evidence from Minoan Crete suggests a system of female political rule – effectively a theocracy of some sort, governed by a college of priestesses. We might ask: why are contemporary researchers so resistant to this conclusion? One can’t blame everything on the fact that proponents of ‘primitive matriarchy’ made exaggerated claims back in 1902. Yes, scholars tend to say that cities ruled by colleges of priestesses are unprecedented in the ethnographic or historical record. But by the same logic, one could equally point out that there is no parallel for a kingdom run by men, in which all the visual representations of authority figures are depictions of women. Something different was clearly happening on Crete.
几乎所有来自米诺斯克里特岛的现有证据都表明有一个女性政治统治体系 —— 实际上是某种神权,由女祭司学院管理。我们可能会问:为什么当代研究人员对这一结论如此抗拒?我们不能把一切都归咎于 “原始母权制” 的支持者在 1902 年就提出了夸张的主张。是的,学者们倾向于说,由女祭司学院统治的城市在人种学或历史记录中是前所未有的。但根据同样的逻辑,人们同样可以指出,在一个由男性管理的王国里,所有权威人物的视觉表现都是女性的形象,这一点是没有可比性的。在克里特岛上显然发生了一些不同的事情。
Certainly, the way in which Minoan artists represented life attests to a profoundly different sensibility to that of Crete’s neighbours on mainland Greece. In an essay called ‘The Shapes of Minoan Desire’, Jack Dempsey points out that erotic attention seems to be displaced from the female body on to just about every other facet of life, starting with the lithe, scantily clad figures of young men as they dart in and out of the bodies of bulls who tease them, or gyrate in sporting activities, or the naked boys represented carrying fish. It’s all a world away from the stiff animal figures that populate the walls of Pylos, or indeed those of Zimri-Lim’s court, let alone the scenes of brutal warfare on later Assyrian wall reliefs. In the Minoan frescoes everything merges – except, that is, for the sharply delineated figures of those leading females, who stand apart or in small groups, happily chatting with one another or admiring some spectacle. Flowers and reeds, birds, bees, dolphins, even hills and mountains are in the throes of a perpetual dance, weaving in and out of each other.
当然,米诺斯艺术家表现生活的方式证明了他们与希腊大陆上的克里特岛的邻居们有着深刻的不同的感受性。在一篇名为 “米诺斯欲望的形状” 的文章中,Jack Dempsey 指出,对色情的关注似乎从女性身体转移到了生活的其他方面,首先是年轻男子轻盈、衣着暴露的身影,他们在挑逗他们的公牛身体里来回穿梭,或在体育活动中扭动身体,或表现携带鱼的赤裸男孩。这与皮洛斯城墙上呆板的动物形象或齐米利·利姆宫廷的动物形象相比,简直是天壤之别,更不用说后来亚述城墙浮雕上残酷的战争场面了。在米诺斯壁画中,一切都融合在一起 —— 除了那些轮廓鲜明的女性主角的形象,她们或分开站立,或成群结队,愉快地相互交谈,或欣赏一些奇观。花朵和芦苇、鸟儿、蜜蜂、海豚,甚至是山丘和山脉都处于一种永恒的舞蹈之中,彼此交织在一起。
Minoan objects too bleed into one another in an extraordinary play on materials – a true ‘science of the concrete’ – that turns pottery into crusted shell and melds the worlds of stone, metal and clay together into a common realm of forms, each mimicking the others.
米诺斯的物品在材料上也是相互渗透的,这是一种真正的 “具体科学”,它把陶器变成了硬壳,把石头、金属和粘土的世界融为一个共同的形式领域,每一个都在模仿其他。
All this unfolds to the undulating rhythms of the sea, the eternal backdrop to this garden of life, and all with a remarkable absence of ‘politics’, in our sense, or what Dempsey calls the ‘self-perpetuating, power-hungry ego’. What these scenes celebrate, as he eloquently puts it, is quite the opposite of politics: it is the ‘ritually induced release from individuality, and an ecstasy of being that is overtly erotic and spiritual at the same time (ek-stasis, “standing beyond oneself”) – a cosmos that both nurtures and ignores the individual, that vibrates with inseparable sexual energies and spiritual epiphanies’. There are no heroes in Minoan art – only players. Crete of the palaces was the realm of Homo ludens . Or perhaps, better said, Femina ludens – not to mention Femina potens .155
所有这一切都在大海的起伏节奏中展开,大海是这个生命花园的永恒背景,而且所有这一切都没有我们意义上的 “政治”,或者邓普西所说的 “自我延续的、 渴望权力的自我”。正如他雄辩地指出的那样,这些场景所颂扬的是与政治完全相反的东西:它是 “通过仪式从个体中释放出来,以及一种同时具有明显的情欲和精神的狂喜(ek-stasis,“超越自我”) —— 一个既培养又忽视个体的宇宙,它以不可分割的性能量和精神顿悟而振动。米诺斯艺术中没有英雄 —— 只有玩家。宫殿中的克里特岛是智人的境界。或者更好地说,是 Femina ludens 的世界,—— 更不用说Femina potens。155
What we’ve learned in this chapter can be briefly summarized. The process usually called ‘state formation’ can in fact mean a bewildering number of very different things. It can mean a game of honour or chance gone terribly wrong, or the incorrigible growth of a particular ritual for feeding the dead; it can mean industrial slaughter, the appropriation by men of female knowledge, or governance by a college of priestesses. But we’ve also learned that when studied and compared more closely, the range of possibilities is far from limitless.
我们在这一章中所学到的东西可以被简单地总结一下。通常被称为 “国家形成” 的过程实际上可以意味着令人困惑的许多非常不同的事情。它可能意味着一场荣誉或机会的游戏出了大错,或者是一种喂养死者的特殊仪式的不可救药的发展;它可能意味着工业化的屠杀,男性对女性知识的占有,或由女祭司学院的管理。但我们也了解到,如果更仔细地研究和比较,可能性的范围远非无限。
In fact, there seem to be both logical and historical constraints on the variety of ways in which power can expand its scope; these limits are the basis of our ‘three principles’ of sovereignty, administration and competitive politics. What we can also see, though, is that – even within these constraints – there were far more interesting things going on than we might ever have guessed by sticking to any conventional definition of ‘the state’. What was really happening in the Minoan palaces? They seem to have been in some sense theatrical stages, in some sense women’s initiation societies, and administrative hubs all at the same time. Were they even a regime of domination at all?
事实上,对于权力扩大范围的各种方式,似乎既有逻辑上的限制,也有历史上的限制;这些限制是我们的主权、行政和竞争政治 “三原则” 的基础。不过,我们也可以看到,即使在这些限制中,发生的事情也远比我们坚持任何传统的 “国家” 定义所猜测的要有趣。米诺斯的宫殿里到底发生了什么?它们似乎在某种意义上是戏剧舞台,在某种意义上是妇女的启蒙社会,同时也是行政中心。它们到底是不是一种统治制度?
It’s also important to recall the very uneven nature of the evidence we’ve been dealing with. What would we be saying about Minoan Crete, or Teotihuacan, or Çatalhöyük for that matter, were it not for the fact that their elaborate wall paintings happen to have been preserved? More than almost any other form of human activity, painting on walls is something people in virtually any cultural setting seem inclined to do. This has been true almost since the beginnings of humanity itself. We can hardly doubt that similar images were produced, on skins and fabrics as well as directly on walls, in any number of so-called ‘early states’ from which only bare stone building blocks or mud-brick enclosures now survive.
同样重要的是,要记住我们一直在处理的证据的非常不平衡的性质。如果不是因为他们精心制作的壁画碰巧被保存下来,我们会怎么评价米诺斯克里特岛、特奥蒂瓦坎或恰塔霍裕克?在墙上作画几乎比任何其他形式的人类活动都要多,几乎在任何文化背景下,人们似乎都倾向于这样做。这几乎是自人类诞生以来的事实。我们很难怀疑,在任何数量的所谓 “早期国家” 中,类似的图像都是在皮肤和织物上以及直接在墙上制作的,现在只有裸露的石头建筑块或泥砖围墙幸存下来。
Archaeology, using a barrage of new scientific techniques, will undoubtedly reveal many more such ‘lost civilizations’, as it is already in the process of doing, from the deserts of Saudi Arabia or Peru to the once seemingly empty steppes of Kazakhstan and the tropical forests of Amazonia. As the evidence accumulates, year on year, for large settlements and impressive structures in previously unsuspected locations, we’d be wise to resist projecting some image of the modern nation state on to their bare surfaces, and consider what other kinds of social possibilities they might attest to.
考古学利用一系列新的科学技术,无疑将揭示出更多这样的 “失落的文明”,正如它已经在做的那样,从沙特阿拉伯或秘鲁的沙漠到曾经看起来空无一人的哈萨克斯坦大草原和亚马逊的热带森林。随着证据的逐年积累,在以前未被发现的地方出现了大型定居点和令人印象深刻的结构,我们最好不要把现代民族国家的一些形象投射到它们光秃秃的表面上,并考虑它们可能证明了哪些其他类型的社会可能性。
On the historical foundations of the indigenous critique
We appear to have come a long way from where this book began, with the Wendat statesman Kandiaronk and the critique of European civilization that developed among indigenous people in North America during the seventeenth century. Now it’s time to bring the story full circle. Recall how, by the eighteenth century, the indigenous critique – and the deep questions it posed about money, faith, hereditary power, women’s rights and personal freedoms – was having an enormous influence on leading figures of the French Enlightenment, but also resulted in a backlash among European thinkers which produced an evolutionary framework for human history that remains broadly intact today. Portraying history as a story of material progress, that framework recast indigenous critics as innocent children of nature, whose views on freedom were a mere side effect of their uncultivated way of life and could not possibly offer a serious challenge to contemporary social thought (which came increasingly to mean just European thought).1
从本书开始的地方,我们似乎已经走过了一段很长的路,即温达政治家坎迪阿伦克和十七世纪在北美原住民中形成的对欧洲文明的批判。现在是时候把这个故事绕一圈了。回顾一下,到了十八世纪,原住民的批判 —— 以及它提出的关于金钱、信仰、世袭权力、妇女权利和个人自由的深刻问题 —— 是如何对法国启蒙运动的主要人物产生巨大影响的,但也导致了欧洲思想家的反弹,产生了一个人类历史的进化框架,这个框架今天仍然大致保持不变。该框架将历史描绘成一个物质进步的故事,将原住民批评者重新塑造成无辜的自然之子,他们对自由的看法仅仅是他们未开化的生活方式的副作用,不可能对当代社会思想(越来越多地指欧洲思想)提出严重挑战。1
In reality, we have not strayed far at all from this starting point, because the conventional wisdom we’ve been challenging throughout this book – about hunter-gatherer societies, the consequences of farming, the rise of cities and states – has its genesis right there: with Turgot, Smith and the reaction against the indigenous critique. Of course, the idea that human societies evolved over time was not particularly special to the eighteenth century, or to Europe.2 What was new in the version of world history put forward by European writers of that century was an insistence on classifying societies by means of subsistence (so that agriculture could be seen as a fundamental break in the history of human affairs); an assumption that as societies grew larger, they inevitably grew more complex; and that ‘complexity’ means not just a greater differentiation of functions, but also the reorganization of human societies into hierarchical ranks, governed from the top down.
实际上,我们完全没有偏离这个起点,因为我们在本书中一直在挑战的传统智慧 —— 关于狩猎·采集社会、农业的后果、城市和国家的兴起 —— 其起源就在这里:杜尔哥、斯密和对本土批判的反应。当然,人类社会随着时间的推移而进化的想法对 18 世纪或欧洲来说并不特别。2在那个世纪的欧洲作家提出的世界历史版本中,新的东西是坚持按生存手段对社会进行分类(这样,农业可以被视为人类事务历史中的一个根本性的突破 );一个假设是,随着社会规模的扩大,它们不可避免地变得更加复杂;而 “复杂性” 不仅意味着功能的更大区分,而且意味着人类社会被重组为等级制度,自上而下进行管理。
This European backlash was so effective that generations of philosophers, historians, social scientists, and almost anyone else since who wishes to address the human story on a broad scale, feels secure in their knowledge of how it should properly start and where it is leading. It begins with an imaginary collection of tiny hunter-gatherer bands and ends with the current collection of capitalist nation states (or some projection of what might come after them). Anything going on in between can be considered interesting – mainly insofar as it contributed to moving us all on down that particular pathway. As we’ve been discovering, one consequence is that huge swathes of the human past disappear from the purview of history, or remain effectively invisible (except to the eyes of a tiny number of researchers, who rarely explain the implications of their findings to each other, let alone to anyone else).
这种欧洲式的反击是如此有效,以至于几代哲学家、历史学家、社会科学家,以及此后几乎所有希望在广泛范围内处理人类故事的人,都对其应该如何正确地开始以及它将被引向何处感到放心。它从一个想象中的微小狩猎采集者的集合开始,到目前的资本主义民族国家的集合结束(或对它们之后可能出现的一些预测)。在这两者之间发生的任何事情都可以被认为是有趣的 —— 主要是因为它有助于推动我们所有人沿着那条特定的道路前进。正如我们所发现的,一个后果是,人类过去的大片土地从历史的视野中消失了,或者实际上仍然是不可见的(除了少数研究人员的眼睛,他们很少向对方解释他们的发现的意义,更不用说向其他人了)。
Since the 1980s it has been commonplace for social theorists to claim we are living in a new ‘post-modern’ age, marked by a suspicion towards metanarratives. This claim is often used as justification for a sort of hyper-specialization: to cast one’s intellectual net wider – to compare notes with colleagues in other fields, even – smacks of imposing a single, imperialistic vision of history. For this very reason, the ‘idea of progress’ is usually held up as a prime example of the way we no longer think about history and society. But such claims are odd, since almost everyone making them nonetheless continues to think in evolutionary terms. We could go further: thinkers who do seek to knit together the findings of specialists, to describe the course of human history on a grand scale, haven’t entirely got past the biblical notion of the Garden of Eden, the Fall and subsequent inevitability of domination. Blinded by the ‘just so’ story of how human societies evolved, they can’t even see half of what’s now before their eyes.
自 20 世纪 80 年代以来,社会理论家经常声称我们生活在一个新的 “后现代” 时代,其特点是对元叙事的怀疑。这种说法经常被用来作为一种过度专业化的理由:把自己的知识网撒得更大 —— 甚至与其他领域的同事进行比较 —— 就有强加一种单一的、帝国主义的历史观的嫌疑。正是由于这个原因,“进步的理念” 通常被作为我们不再思考历史和社会的方式的一个主要例子。但这种说法很奇怪,因为几乎所有提出这种说法的人都继续用进化的术语来思考。我们可以更进一步:那些试图将专家的研究结果编织在一起,在一个大尺度上描述人类历史进程的思想家,还没有完全摆脱圣经中的伊甸园、堕落和随后的统治的概念。他们被人类社会如何进化的 “仅仅如此” 的故事所蒙蔽,甚至看不到现在摆在他们眼前的一半东西。
As a result, the same portrayers of world history who profess themselves believers in freedom, democracy and women’s rights continue to treat historical epochs of relative freedom, democracy and women’s rights as so many ‘dark ages’. Similarly, as we’ve seen, the concept of ‘civilization’ is still largely reserved for societies whose defining characteristics include high-handed autocrats, imperial conquests and the use of slave labour. Presented with undeniable cases of large and materially sophisticated societies for which evidence of such things is conspicuously lacking – ancient centres like Teotihuacan or Knossos, for example – the standard recourse is to throw up one’s hands and say: who can tell what was really going on there? or insist that Ozymandias’ throne room must be lurking in there somewhere, but that we simply haven’t found it yet.
结果,那些自称是自由、民主和妇女权利的信徒的世界历史描述者,继续把相对自由、民主和妇女权利的历史时代视为许多 “黑暗时代”。同样,正如我们所看到的,“文明” 的概念在很大程度上仍然保留给那些具有高压独裁者、帝国征服和使用奴隶劳动等决定性特征的社会。在不可否认的情况下,大型的、物质上先进的社会明显缺乏这样的证据 —— 例如像特奥蒂瓦坎或克诺索斯这样的古代中心 —— 标准的做法是举起手来说:谁能告诉我们那里到底发生了什么?
You may object: perhaps much of human history was more complicated than we usually admit, but surely what matters is how things ended up. For at least 2,000 years, most of the world’s population have been living under kings or emperors of one sort or another. Even in places where monarchy did not exist – much of Africa or Oceania, for example – we find that (at the very least) patriarchy, and often violent domination of other sorts, have been widespread. Once established, such institutions are very hard to get rid of. So your objection might run: all you’re saying is that the inevitable took a little longer to happen. That doesn’t make it any less inevitable.
你可能会反对:也许人类历史的大部分内容比我们通常承认的要复杂,但重要的是事情的结局。至少两千年来,世界上大多数人都生活在这样或那样的国王或帝王之下。即使在不存在君主制的地方 —— 例如非洲或大洋洲的大部分地区 —— 我们也发现,(至少)父权制,以及其他类型的暴力统治,一直很普遍。一旦建立起来,这种制度就很难摆脱了。因此,你的反对意见可能会说:你所说的是,不可避免的事情发生的时间长了一点。这并不意味着它就不那么不可避免了。
Similarly, with farming. True, your objection might run: agriculture might not have transformed everything overnight, but surely it laid the groundwork for later systems of domination? Wasn’t it really just a matter of time? Did not the very possibility of piling up large surpluses of grain, in effect, lay a trap? Wasn’t it inevitable that, sooner or later, some warrior-prince like Narmer of Egypt would begin amassing stockpiles for his henchmen? And once he did, surely the game was over. Rival kingdoms and empires would quickly come into being. Some would find the means to expand; they would insist on their subjects producing more and more grain, and those subjects would grow in number, even as the number of remaining free peoples tended to remain stable. Once again, was it not just a matter of time before one of those kingdoms (or, as it turned out, a small collection of them) came up with a successful formula for world conquest – just the right combination of guns, germs and steel – and imposed its system on everybody else?
同样,在农业方面也是如此。诚然,你的反对意见可能是:农业可能没有在一夜之间改变一切,但它肯定为后来的统治体系奠定了基础?难道这不是一个时间问题吗?难道堆积大量粮食盈余的可能性本身就不是一个陷阱吗?迟早有一天,一些像埃及的纳默尔这样的战士王子会开始为他的手下囤积粮食,难道这不是不可避免的吗?而一旦他这样做了,游戏肯定就结束了。对立的王国和帝国将很快出现。一些人会找到扩张的手段;他们会坚持,他们的臣民会生产越来越多的粮食,而这些臣民的数量会越来越多,即使剩下的自由民的数量趋于稳定。再一次,这些王国中的一个(或者,正如它所证明的,其中的一个小集合)想出了一个成功的世界征服公式 —— 枪支、细菌和钢铁的正确组合 —— 并将其系统强加给其他人,这难道不是时间问题吗?
James Scott – a renowned political scientist who has devoted much of his career to understanding the role of states (and those who succeed in evading them) in human history – has a compelling description of how this agricultural trap works. The Neolithic, he suggests, began with flood-retreat agriculture, which was easy work and encouraged redistribution; the largest populations were, indeed, concentrated in deltaic environments, but the first states in the Middle East (he concentrates largely on these; and China) developed upriver, in areas with an especially strong focus on cereal agriculture – wheat, barley, millet – and relatively limited access to a range of other staples. The key to the importance of grain, Scott notes, is that it was durable, portable, easily divisible and quantifiable by bulk, and therefore an ideal medium to serve as a basis for taxation. Growing above ground – unlike, say, certain tubers or legumes – grain crops were also highly visible and amenable to appropriation. Cereal agriculture did not cause the rise of extractive states, but it was certainly predisposed to their fiscal requirements.3
詹姆斯·斯科特 —— 一位著名的政治学家,在其职业生涯中大部分时间都致力于了解国家(以及那些成功躲避国家的人)在人类历史上的作用 —— 对这种农业陷阱的作用有一个令人信服的描述。他认为,新石器时代是以退水农业开始的,这种农业工作简单,鼓励重新分配;最大的人口确实集中在三角洲环境中,但中东的第一批国家(他主要集中在这些国家;以及中国)是在上游发展起来的,这些地区特别注重谷物农业 —— 小麦、大麦、小米,而对其他一系列主食的获取相对有限。斯科特指出,粮食的重要性的关键在于它耐用、便于携带、容易分割并可按体积量化,因此是作为税收基础的理想媒介。与某些块茎或豆类作物不同,粮食作物生长在地面上,也是高度可见的,可以被占有。谷物农业并没有导致采掘业国家的兴起,但它肯定倾向于其财政要求。3
Like money, grain allows a certain form of terrifying equivalence. Whatever the reasons why it initially became a predominant crop in a given region (as we’ve seen – in Egypt for example – this had much to do with changes in rituals for the dead), once this happened a permanent kingdom could always emerge. However, Scott also points out that for much of history this process turned out to be a trap for these newfound ‘grain states’ as well, limiting them to areas that favoured intensive agriculture, and leaving surrounding highlands, fenlands and marshes largely beyond their reach.4 What’s more, even within those confines the grain-based kingdoms were fragile, always prone to collapse under the weight of over-population, ecological devastation and the kind of endemic diseases that always seemed to result when too many humans, domesticated animals and parasites accumulated in one place.
像货币一样,粮食允许某种形式的可怕的等价物。不管它最初成为某一地区主要作物的原因是什么(正如我们所看到的 —— 以埃及为例 —— 这与亡灵仪式的变化有很大关系),一旦发生这种情况,一个永久的王国总是可以出现的。然而,斯科特也指出,在历史的大部分时间里,这个过程对这些新发现的 “谷物国家” 来说也是一个陷阱,它将它们限制在有利于集约化农业的地区,而使周围的高地、沼泽地和沼泽地基本上无法到达。4更重要的是,即使在这些范围内,以粮食为基础的王国也很脆弱,在人口过剩、生态破坏和地方病的重压下,总是容易崩溃,而地方病似乎总是在太多人类、驯养的动物和寄生虫聚集在一个地方时产生的。
Ultimately, though, Scott’s focus isn’t really on states at all: it’s about the ‘barbarians’ – a term Scott uses for all those groups which came to surround the little islands of authoritarian-bureaucratic rule, and which existed in a largely symbiotic relation with them: some ever-shifting mix of raiding, trading and mutual avoidance. As Scott argued about the hill peoples of Southeast Asia, some of these ‘barbarians’ became, effectively, anarchists: organizing their lives in explicit opposition to the valley societies below, or to prevent the emergence of stratified classes in their own midst. As we’ve seen, such conscious rejection of bureaucratic values – another example of cultural schismogenesis – could also give rise to ‘heroic societies’, a hurly-burly of petty lords whose pre-eminence was founded on dramatic contests of war, feasting, boasting, duelling, games, gifts and sacrifice. Monarchy itself is likely to have started that way, on the fringes of urban-bureaucratic systems.
但最终,斯科特的重点根本不是国家:而是 “野蛮人” —— 斯科特用这个词来形容所有那些围绕着专制官僚统治的小岛的群体,他们在很大程度上与专制官僚存在共生关系:一些不断变化的袭击、贸易和相互规避的组合。正如斯科特在谈到东南亚的山地民族时所说,这些 “野蛮人” 中的一些人实际上成了无政府主义者:组织他们的生活,明确反对下面的山谷社会,或者防止在他们自己中间出现分层阶级。正如我们所看到的,这种对官僚价值观的自觉拒绝 —— 文化分裂的另一个例子 —— 也可能产生 “英雄社会”,一个由小领主组成的匆匆忙忙的社会,其卓越地位建立在戏剧性的战争、宴会、吹嘘、决斗、游戏、礼物和牺牲的竞争上。君主制本身也可能是这样开始的,在城市官僚系统的边缘地带。
But to continue with Scott: barbarian monarchies remained either small-scale or, if they did expand – as was spectacularly the case under figures like Alaric, Attila, Genghis or Tamerlane – the expansion was short-lived. Throughout much of history, grain states and barbarians remained ‘dark twins’, locked together in an unresolvable tension, since neither could break out of their ecological niches. When the states had the upper hand, slaves and mercenaries flowed in one direction; when the barbarians were dominant, tribute flowed to appease the most dangerous warlord; or alternatively, some overlord would manage to organize an effective coalition, sweep in on the cities and either lay waste to them, or more typically, attempt to rule them, and inevitably find himself and his retinue absorbed as a new governing class. As the Mongolian adage went, ‘One can conquer a kingdom on horseback, to rule it one must dismount.’
但要继续说斯科特:蛮族君主要么保持小规模,要么即使扩张 —— 如阿拉里克、阿提拉、成吉思汗或塔梅尔兰等人物的壮观情况 —— 扩张也是短暂的。在历史上的大部分时间里,粮食国家和野蛮人仍然是 “黑暗的双胞胎”,被锁在一种无法解决的紧张关系中,因为他们都无法突破自己的生态位。当国家占上风时,奴隶和雇佣兵就会朝一个方向流动;当野蛮人占优势时,贡品就会流入,以安抚最危险的军阀;或者,某个霸主会设法组织一个有效的联盟,扫荡城市,或者更典型的是,试图统治它们,并不可避免地发现自己和他的随从被吸收为一个新的统治阶层。正如蒙古人的格言所说,“一个人可以在马背上征服一个王国,但要统治它就必须下马。”
Scott, though, doesn’t draw any particular conclusions. Rather, he simply remarks that while the period from about 3000 BC to AD 1600 was a fairly miserable one for the bulk of the world’s farmers, it was a Golden Age for the barbarians, who reaped all the advantages of their proximity to dynastic states and empires (luxuries to loot and plunder), while themselves living comparatively easy lives. And it was usually possible for at least some of the oppressed to join their ranks. For most of history, he suggests, this is what rebellion typically looked like: defection to join the ranks of nearby barbarians. To put the matter in our own terms, while these agrarian kingdoms managed largely to abolish the freedom to ignore orders, they had a much harder time abolishing the freedom to move away. Empires were exceptional and short-lived, and even the most powerful – Roman, Han, Ming, Inca – could not prevent large-scale movements of people into and out of their spheres of control. Until around a half-millennium ago, a large proportion of the world’s population still lived either beyond the tax collector’s purview or within reach of some relatively straightforward means of escaping it.5
不过,斯科特并没有得出任何特别的结论。相反,他只是说,虽然从公元前 3000 年到公元 1600 年这段时间对世界上大部分农民来说是一个相当悲惨的时期,但对野蛮人来说却是一个黄金时代,他们获得了靠近王朝国家和帝国的所有好处(抢劫和掠夺的奢侈品),而自己却过着相对轻松的生活。而且通常至少有一些受压迫者可以加入他们的行列。他认为,在历史上的大部分时间里,这就是叛乱的典型表现 :叛逃,加入附近的野蛮人行列。用我们自己的话来说,虽然这些农业王国在很大程度上设法废除了无视命令的自由,但他们更难废除离开的自由。帝国是特殊的、短暂的,即使是最强大的帝国 —— 罗马、汉、明、印加 —— 也无法阻止人们大规模地进出其控制范围。直到大约半千年前,世界上很大一部分人口仍然生活在征税人的管辖范围之外,或者在一些相对直接的逃避手段的范围之内。5
Yet today, in our twenty-first-century world, this is obviously no longer the case. Something did go terribly wrong – at least from the point of view of the barbarians. We no longer live in that world. But merely recognizing that it existed for so long allows us to pose a further important question. How inevitable, really, were the type of governments we have today, with their particular fusion of territorial sovereignty, intense administration and competitive politics? Was this really the necessary culmination of human history?
然而今天,在我们 21 世纪的世界里,情况显然不再是这样了。确实出了很大的问题 —— 至少从野蛮人的角度来看是这样。我们不再生活在那个世界里了。但仅仅认识到它存在了这么久,我们就可以提出另一个重要问题。我们今天所拥有的政府类型,以及它们对领土主权、严格的行政管理和竞争性政治的特殊融合,究竟是如何不可避免的?这真的是人类历史的必然结果吗?
One problem with evolutionism is that it takes ways of life that developed in symbiotic relation with each other and reorganizes them into separate stages of human history. By the late nineteenth century, it was becoming clear that the original sequence as developed by Turgot and others – hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, then finally industrial civilization – didn’t really work. Yet at the same time, the publication of Darwin’s theories meant that evolutionism became entrenched as the only possible scientific approach to history – or at least the only one likely to be given credence in universities. So the search was on for more workable categories. In his 1877 Ancient Society, Lewis Henry Morgan proposed a series of steps from ‘savagery’ through ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’ which was widely adopted in the new field of anthropology. Meanwhile, Marxists concentrated on forms of domination, and the move out of primitive communism towards slavery, feudalism and capitalism, to be followed by socialism (then communism). All these approaches were basically unworkable, and eventually had to be thrown away as well.
进化论的一个问题是,它把在相互共生关系中发展起来的生活方式,重新组织成人类历史的独立阶段。到 19 世纪末,人们逐渐意识到杜尔哥和其他人制定的原始顺序 —— 狩猎、畜牧业、农业,最后是工业文明 —— 其实并不可行。然而,与此同时,达尔文理论的发表意味着进化论成为唯一可能的科学历史方法,或者至少是唯一可能在大学里得到信任的方法。因此,人们开始寻找更可行的类别。在 1877 年的《古代社会》中,刘易斯·亨利·摩根提出了从 “野蛮” 到 “未开化” 再到 “文明” 的一系列步骤,在人类学的新领域被广泛采用。同时,马克思主义者专注于统治的形式,以及从原始共产主义走向奴隶制、封建主义和资本主义,然后是社会主义(然后是共产主义)。所有这些方法基本上都是不可行的,最终也不得不被抛开。
Since the 1950s, a body of neo-evolutionist theory has sought to define a new version of the sequence, based on how efficiently groups harvest energy from their environment.6 As we’ve seen, almost nobody today subscribes to this framework in its entirety. Indeed, whole volumes have been written taking it to task, or pointing out the many exceptions to its logic; we are ‘over all that’ and have ‘moved on’ would be the standard reaction of most anthropologists and archaeologists when confronted with such an evolutionary scheme today. But if our fields have moved on, they have done so, it seems, without putting any alternative vision in place, the result being that almost anyone who is not an archaeologist or anthropologist tends to fall back on the older scheme when they set out to think or write about world history on a large canvas. For this reason it might be useful to summarize the older scheme’s basic sequence here:
自 20 世纪 50 年代以来,一批新进化主义理论试图,根据群体从环境中获取能量的效率,定义一个新版本的序列。6正如我们所看到的,今天几乎没有人认同这个框架的全部内容。事实上,人们已经写了整整一卷书来指责它,或者指出其逻辑的许多例外情况;我们已经 “结束了所有这些”,并且已经 “向前迈进”,这是今天大多数人类学家和考古学家面对这种进化方案时的标准反应。但是,如果我们的领域已经向前迈进了,那么,他们在这样做的时候,似乎并没有把任何替代性的观点放在位,其结果是,几乎所有不是考古学家或人类学家的人,当他们开始思考或撰写世界历史的大画卷时,都倾向于回到旧的方案上。由于这个原因,在这里总结一下旧方案的基本顺序可能是有用的。
Band societies: the simplest stage is still assumed to be made up of hunter-gatherers like the!Kung or Hadza, supposedly living in small mobile groups of twenty to forty individuals, without any formal political roles and minimal division of labour. Such societies are thought to be egalitarian, effectively by default.
族群社会:最简单的阶段仍然被认为是由像 Kung 或 Hadza 这样的狩猎采集者组成的,据说他们生活在 20 到 40 人的小型流动群体中,没有任何正式的政治角色和最小的劳动分工。这种社会被认为是平等的,实际上是默认的。
Tribes: societies like the Nuer, Dayaks or Kayapo. Tribesmen are typically assumed to be ‘horticulturalists’, which is to say they farm but don’t create irrigation works or use heavy equipment like ploughs; they are egalitarian, at least among those of the same age and gender; their leaders have only informal, or at least no coercive, power. ‘Tribes’ are typically arranged into the sort of complex lineage or totemic clan structures beloved of anthropologists. Economically, the central figures are ‘big men’ – such as were typically found in Melanesia – responsible for creating voluntary coalitions of contributors to sponsor rituals and feasts. Ritual or craft specialism is limited and usually part-time; tribes are numerically larger than bands, but settlements tend to be roughly of the same size and importance.
部落:像努尔人、达雅克人或卡亚波人这样的社会。部落成员通常被认为是 “园艺家”,也就是说,他们耕种,但不创造灌溉工程,也不使用像犁这样的重型设备;他们是平等的,至少在同年龄和同性别的人之间;他们的领导人只有非正式的权力,或者至少没有强制力。“部落” 通常被安排成人类学家所喜爱的那种复杂的世系或图腾氏族结构。在经济上,核心人物是 “大人物” —— 比如通常在美拉尼西亚发现的 —— 负责建立自愿的贡献者联盟来赞助仪式和宴会。仪式或工艺的专业性是有限的,而且通常是兼职的;部落在数量上比带子大,但定居点的规模和重要性往往大致相同。
Chiefdoms: while the clans of tribal society are all, ultimately, equivalent, in chiefdoms the kinship system becomes the basis for a system of rank, with aristocrats, commoners and even slaves. The Shilluk, Natchez or Calusa are typically treated as chiefdoms; so are, say, Polynesian kingdoms, or the lords of ancient Gaul. Intensification of production leads to a significant surplus, and classes of full-time craft and ritual specialists emerge, not to mention the chiefly families themselves. There is at least one level of settlement hierarchy (the chief’s residence, and everyone else), and the main economic function of the chief is redistributive: pooling resources, often forcibly, and then doling them out to everyone, usually during spectacular feasts.
酋长国:虽然部落社会的部族最终都是平等的,但在酋长国中,亲属关系系统成为等级系统的基础,有贵族、平民甚至奴隶。希鲁克人、纳奇兹人或卡鲁萨人通常被视为酋长王国;例如, 波利尼西亚王国,或古代高卢的领主也是如此。生产的集约化导致了大量的剩余,出现了全职的工艺和仪式专家阶层,更不用说酋长家庭本身了。至少有一级定居等级(酋长的住所和其他所有人),酋长的主要经济职能是再分配:集中资源,通常是强制的,然后把它们分给所有人,通常是在壮观的盛宴上。
States: much as already described, these tend to be characterized by intensive cereal agriculture, a legal monopoly on the use of force, professional administration and a complex division of labour.
国家:如前所述,这些国家的特点是密集的谷物农业、对使用武力的合法垄断、专业行政管理和复杂的劳动分工。
As many twentieth-century anthropologists pointed out at the time, this scheme doesn’t really work either. In reality, ‘big men’ seem almost entirely confined to Melanesia. ‘Indian chiefs’ such as Geronimo or Sitting Bull were, in fact, tribal headmen, whose role was nothing like big men in Papua New Guinea. Most of those labelled ‘chiefs’ in the neo-evolutionist model, as we’ve already noted, look suspiciously like what we normally think of as ‘kings’ and may well live in fortified castles, wear ermine robes, support court jesters, have hundreds of wives and harem eunuchs. However, they rarely engage in the mass redistribution of resources, at least not in any systematic way.
正如许多二十世纪的人类学家当时指出的那样,这个方案也并不真正可行。在现实中,“大人物” 似乎几乎完全局限于美拉尼西亚。诸如 Geronimo 或 Sitting Bull 这样的 “印第安酋长” 实际上是部落头人,他们的角色与巴布亚新几内亚的大人物完全不同。正如我们已经注意到的,在新进化论模式中,大多数被称为 “酋长” 的人看起来很像我们通常认为的 “国王”,而且很可能住在坚固的城堡里,穿着朱红色的长袍,养着宫廷小丑,有数百个妻子和后宫太监。然而,他们很少参与大规模的资源再分配,至少没有以任何系统的方式进行。
The evolutionist response to such critiques was not to abandon the scheme but to fine-tune it. Perhaps chiefdoms are more predatory, evolutionists argued, but they are still fundamentally different to states. What’s more, they can be subdivided between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ chiefdoms: in the former, the chief really was just a glorified big man, still working like everyone else, with only minimal administrative assistance; in the complex version, he was backed up by at least two levels of administrative staff, allowing a genuine class structure. Finally, chiefdoms ‘cycled’, which is to say that the simple overlords were constantly, often quite methodically, trying to patch together tiny empires by conquering or subordinating local rivals, so as to catapult themselves towards the next stage of complexity (characterized by three levels of administrative hierarchy), or even to found states. While a few ambitious chiefs did manage to pull this off, most failed; they reached their ecological or social limits; this rankled with people; the whole jerry-built contraption collapsed, leaving it for some other aspiring dynast to begin trying to conquer the world – or at least, those parts of it considered worth conquering.
进化论者对这种批评的反应不是放弃这个计划,而是对它进行微调。进化论者认为,也许酋长国更具掠夺性,但它们与国家仍有根本的不同。更重要的是,它们可以被细分为 “简单” 和 “复杂” 的酋长国:在前者中,酋长真的只是一个被美化的大人物,仍然像其他人一样工作,只有最小的行政协助;在复杂的版本中,他至少有两级行政人员的支持,允许真正的阶级结构。最后,酋长国 “循环”,也就是说,简单的霸主不断地,往往是相当有条理地,试图通过征服或征服当地的对手来拼凑小帝国,以便将自己推向下一个复杂阶段(以三级行政等级为特征),甚至是建立国家。虽然有几个雄心勃勃的首领确实设法做到了这一点,但大多数人都失败了;他们达到了生态或社会的极限;这让,整个豆腐渣工程崩溃了,让其他有抱负的王朝开始尝试征服世界 —— 或者至少是那些被认为值得征服的部分。
In academic circles, an odd disjuncture has developed around the use of such schemes. Most cultural anthropologists view this kind of evolutionary thinking as a sort of quaint relic from their discipline’s past, which no one today could possibly take seriously; while most archaeologists only employ terms like ‘tribe’, ‘chiefdom’ or ‘state’ for lack of an alternative terminology. Yet almost anyone else will treat such schemes as the self-evident basis for all further discussion. Throughout this book, we have spent a good deal of time demonstrating how deceptive all this is. The reason why these ways of thinking remain in place, no matter how many times people point out their incoherence, is precisely because we find it so difficult to imagine history that isn’t teleological – that is, to organize history in a way which does not imply that current arrangements were somehow inevitable.
在学术界,围绕着这种方案的使用已经形成了一种奇怪的分歧。大多数文化人类学家认为这种进化思想是他们学科过去的一种古怪的遗物,今天没有人可能认真对待;而大多数考古学家只使用 “部落”、“酋长国” 或 “国家” 等术语,因为缺乏替代术语。然而,几乎任何人都会把这种方案作为所有进一步讨论的不言而喻的基础。在本书中,我们花了大量的时间来证明这一切是多么具有欺骗性。无论人们多少次指出这些思维方式的不连贯性,它们仍然存在的原因正是因为我们发现很难想象不是目的论的历史 —— 也就是说,以一种不意味着当前安排在某种程度上是不可避免的方式来组织历史。
As we have already remarked, one of the most puzzling aspects of living in history is that it’s almost impossible to predict the course of future events; yet, once events have happened, it’s difficult to know what it would even mean to say something else ‘could’ have happened. A properly historical event has, perhaps, two qualities: it could not have been predicted beforehand, but it only happens once. One does not get to fight the Battle of Gaugamela over again, to see what would have happened if Darius had actually won. Speculating what might have happened – had Alexander, say, been hit by a stray arrow, and there had never been a Ptolemaic Egypt or Seleucid Syria – is at best an idle game. It might raise profound questions – how much difference can an individual really make in history? – but nevertheless, these are questions that cannot ever be definitively answered.
正如我们已经说过的,生活在历史中最令人困惑的一个方面是,几乎不可能预测未来事件的进程;然而,一旦事件发生了,就很难知道说其他事情 “可能” 发生是什么意思。一个适当的历史事件也许有两个特质:它事先不可能被预测,但它只发生一次。我们不能再重复高加米拉之战,看看如果大流士真的赢了会发生什么。推测可能发生的情况 —— 比如说,如果亚历山大被一支流箭射中,而且从来没有托勒密埃及或塞琉古叙利亚 —— 充其量只是一场空谈。它可能会引起一些深刻的问题 —— 一个人在历史上到底能有多大的区别?- 但尽管如此,这些问题永远无法得到明确的回答。
The best we can do, when confronted with unique historical events or configurations such as the Persian or Hellenistic empires, is to engage in a project of comparison. This at least can give us an idea of the sort of things that might happen, and at best a sense of the pattern by which one thing is likely to follow another. The problem is that ever since the Iberian invasion of the Americas, and subsequent European colonial empires, we can’t even really do that, because there’s ultimately been just one political-economic system and it is global. If we wish, say, to assess whether the modern nation state, industrial capitalism and the spread of lunatic asylums are necessarily linked, as opposed to separate phenomena that just happen to have come together in one part of the world, there’s simply no basis on which to judge.7 All three emerged at a time when the planet was effectively a single global system and we have no other planets to compare ourselves to.
当我们面对独特的历史事件或配置,如波斯或希腊帝国时,我们能做的最好的事情是参与一个比较项目。这至少可以让我们对可能发生的事情有一个概念,最多可以让我们了解到一件事情有可能发生在另一件事情之后的模式。问题是,自从伊比利亚人入侵美洲,以及随后的欧洲殖民帝国以来,我们甚至不能真正做到这一点,因为最终只有一个政治经济体系,而且是全球性的。如果,比如说,我们希望评估现代民族国家、工业资本主义和精神病院的蔓延是否有必然的联系,而不是单独的现象,只是碰巧在世界的一个地方走到了一起,那么根本没有判断的依据。7所有这三种现象出现的时候,地球实际上是一个单一的全球系统,而我们没有其他星球可以与之比较。
One could make the argument – many do – that for most of human history this was already the case. Eurasia and Africa already formed a single interconnected system. Certainly, people, objects and ideas did move back and forth across the Indian Ocean and the Silk Roads (or their Bronze and Iron Age precursors); as a result, dramatic political and economic changes often appeared to occur in more or less co-ordinated fashion across the Eurasian land mass. To take one famous example: almost a century ago, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers noted that all the major schools of speculative philosophy we know today seem to have emerged – apparently independently – in Greece, India and China at roughly the same time, between the eighth and third centuries BC ; what’s more, they emerged in precisely those cities which had recently seen the invention and widespread adoption of coined money. Jaspers called this the Axial Age, a term since expanded by others to include the period that saw the birth of all today’s world religions, stretching from the Persian prophet Zoroaster (c .800 BC ) to the coming of Islam (c .AD 600). Now, the core period of Jaspers’s Axial Age – encompassing the lifetimes of Pythagoras, the Buddha and Confucius – corresponds not only to the invention of metal coinage and new forms of speculative thought, but also the spread of chattel slavery across Eurasia, even in places where it had barely existed before; moreover, chattel slavery would eventually fall into decline after a succession of Axial Age empires dissolved (the Maurya, Han, Parthian, Roman), along with their prevailing systems of currency.8 Obviously, it would be wrong to say that Eurasia can be treated as just one place, and therefore to conclude that comparing how these processes unfolded in different parts of Eurasia is meaningless. Equally, it would be wrong to conclude that such patterns are universal features of human development. They might just be what happened in Eurasia.
人们可以提出这样的论点 —— 很多人都这样认为 —— 在人类历史的大部分时间里,情况已经是这样了。欧亚大陆和非洲已经形成了一个单一的相互连接的系统。当然,人、物和思想确实在印度洋和丝绸之路(或其青铜和铁器时代的前身)上来回移动;因此,戏剧性的政治和经济变化往往以或多或少的协调方式在欧亚大陆上发生。举一个著名的例子:近一个世纪前,德国哲学家卡尔·雅斯贝尔斯指出,我们今天知道的所有主要推理哲学流派似乎都是在同一时间,即公元前 8 世纪和公元前 3 世纪之间,在希腊、印度和中国出现的 —— 显然是独立的;更重要的是,它们正是在那些最近发明和广泛采用硬币的城市出现的。雅斯贝尔斯将这一时期称为轴心时代,这个术语后来被其他人扩展到包括今天所有世界宗教的诞生,从波斯先知琐罗亚斯德(约公元前 800 年)延伸到伊斯兰教的到来(约公元 600 年)。现在,雅斯贝尔斯的轴心时代的核心时期 —— 包括毕达哥拉斯、佛陀和孔子的一生 —— 不仅对应着金属硬币的发明和新形式的投机思想,还对应着动产奴隶制在整个欧亚大陆的传播,甚至在以前几乎不存在的地方。此外,在轴心时代的一系列帝国(毛利族、汉族、帕提亚族、罗马族)解体后,动产阶级奴隶制最终将与他们当时的货币体系一起衰退。8显然,如果说欧亚大陆可以被视为一个地方,并因此得出结论说比较这些过程在欧亚大陆不同地区的发展情况是没有意义的,那是错误的。同样,如果得出结论说这种模式是人类发展的普遍特征,那也是错误的。它们可能只是发生在欧亚大陆的情况。
Much of Africa, Oceania or northwestern Europe for that matter, was so tied into the great empires of this period – notably with the convergence of terrestrial and maritime trade routes around the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean in the fifth century BC, but arguably already much earlier – that it’s hard to know whether they can be taken as independent points of comparison either. The only real exception were the Americas. Admittedly, even before 1492 there must have been some occasional movement back and forth between the two hemispheres (otherwise there wouldn’t have been a human population in the Americas to begin with); but prior to the Iberian invasion, the Americas were not in direct or regular communication with Eurasia. They were in no sense part of the same ‘world system’. This is important, because it means we do have one truly independent point of comparison (possibly even two, if we consider North and South America as separate), where it is possible to ask: does history really have to take a certain direction?
非洲、大洋洲或欧洲西北部的大部分地区都与这一时期的大帝国紧密相连 —— 特别是在公元前五世纪印度洋和地中海周围的陆上和海上贸易路线的汇合,但可以说更早 —— 以至于很难知道它们是否可以作为独立的比较点。唯一真正的例外是美洲。诚然,即使在 1492 年之前,两个半球之间也肯定有一些偶尔的来回流动(否则美洲就不会有人类人口了);但在伊比利亚人入侵之前,美洲与欧亚大陆没有直接或定期的交流。他们在任何意义上都不是同一个 “世界体系” 的一部分。这一点很重要,因为它意味着我们确实有一个真正独立的比较点(甚至可能是两个,如果我们把北美和南美看作是独立的),在那里我们可以问:历史真的必须采取某种方向吗?
In the case of the Americas, we actually can pose questions such as: was the rise of monarchy as the world’s predominant form of government inevitable? Is cereal agriculture really a trap, and can one really say that once the farming of wheat or rice or maize becomes sufficiently widespread, it’s only a matter of time before some enterprising overlord seizes control of the granaries and establishes a regime of bureaucratically administered violence? And once he does, is it inevitable that others will imitate his example? Judging by the history of pre-Columbian North America, at least, the answer to all these questions is a resounding ‘no’.
就美洲而言,我们实际上可以提出这样的问题:君主制作为世界主要政府形式的崛起是不可避免的吗?谷物农业真的是一个陷阱吗?真的可以说,一旦小麦、水稻或玉米的耕种变得足够广泛,一些有进取心的霸主夺取粮仓的控制权并建立一个官僚管理的暴力政权只是时间问题吗?而一旦他这样做了,其他人是否不可避免地会模仿他的例子?至少从哥伦布时代之前的北美历史来看,所有这些问题的答案都是响亮的 “不”。
In fact, although archaeologists of North America use the language of ‘bands’, ‘tribes’, ‘chiefdoms’ and ‘states,’ what actually seems to have happened there defies all such assumptions. We’ve already seen how in the western half of the continent there was, if anything, a movement away from agriculture in the centuries before the European invasion; and how Plains societies often seem to have moved back and forth, over the course of any given year, between bands and something that shares at least some of the features we identify with states – in other words, between what should have been opposite ends of the scale of social evolution. Even more startling in its own way is what happened in the eastern part of the continent.
事实上,尽管北美的考古学家使用 “部落”、“部落”、“酋长国” 和 “国家” 的语言,但那里实际发生的情况似乎违背了所有这些假设。我们已经看到,在欧洲入侵之前的几个世纪里,北美大陆的西半部是如何远离农业的;以及平原社会如何在任何一年的时间里,在部落和至少具有我们所认定的国家特征的东西之间来回移动 —— 换句话说,在本应是社会演变规模的两端之间。更令人吃惊的是发生在该大陆东部的情况。
From roughly AD 1050 to 1350 there was, in what’s now East St Louis, a city whose real name has been forgotten, but which is known to history as Cahokia.9 It appears to have been the capital of what James Scott would term a classic budding ‘grain state’, rising magnificently and seemingly from nowhere, around the time that the Song Dynasty ruled in China and the Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq. Cahokia’s population peaked at something in the order of 15,000 people; then it abruptly dissolved. Whatever Cahokia represented in the eyes of those under its sway, it seems to have ended up being overwhelmingly and resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of its people. For centuries after its demise the site where the city once stood, and hundreds of miles of river valleys around it, lay entirely devoid of human habitation: a ‘vacant quarter’ (rather like the Forbidden Zone in Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes), a place of ruins and bitter memories.10
大约从公元 1050 年到 1350 年,在现在的东圣路易斯,有一个城市,它的真实名字已经被遗忘,但它被历史称为卡霍基亚。9它似乎是詹姆斯·斯科特所称的典型的萌芽中的 “谷物国家” 的首都,在中国的宋朝和伊拉克的阿巴斯哈里发统治时期,它华丽地崛起,似乎无从谈起。卡霍基亚的人口在 15,000 人左右达到顶峰;然后它突然解体。无论卡霍基亚在其统治下的人们眼中代表着什么,它似乎最终都被绝大多数的人所拒绝。在它消亡后的几个世纪里,这个城市曾经存在的地方,以及它周围数百英里的河谷,完全没有人类居住:一个 “空旷的区域”(颇像皮埃尔·布勒的《人猿星球》中的禁区),一个充满废墟和痛苦回忆的地方。10
Successor kingdoms to Cahokia sprang up to the south but then likewise crumbled. By the time Europeans arrived on the eastern seaboard of North America, ‘Mississippian civilization’ – as it has come to be known – was but a distant memory and the descendants of Cahokia’s subjects and neighbours appear to have reorganized themselves into polis -sized tribal republics, in careful ecological balance with their natural environment. What had happened? Were the rulers of Cahokia and other Mississippian cities overthrown by popular uprisings, undermined by mass defection, victims of ecological catastrophe, or (more likely) some intricate mix of all three? Archaeology may one day supply more definitive answers. Until such time, what we can say with some confidence is that the societies encountered by European invaders from the sixteenth century onwards were the product of centuries of political conflict and self-conscious debate. They were, in many cases, societies in which the ability to engage in self-conscious political debate was itself considered one of the highest human values.
卡霍基亚的后继王国在南方兴起,但随后也同样崩溃了。当欧洲人到达北美东部沿海地区时,“密西西比文明” —— 正如它被称为的那样 —— 已经成为遥远的记忆,卡霍基亚的臣民和邻居的后代似乎已经将自己重组为政体大小的部落共和国,与自然环境保持着谨慎的生态平衡。发生了什么事?卡霍基亚和其他密西西比城市的统治者是被民众起义推翻,还是被大规模叛变破坏,还是生态灾难的受害者,或者(更有可能)是三者的错综复杂的组合?考古学有一天可能会提供更明确的答案。在这之前,我们可以有把握地说,从 16 世纪开始,欧洲入侵者遇到的社会是几个世纪的政治冲突和自我意识的辩论的产物。在许多情况下,这些社会中,参与自觉的政治辩论的能力本身就被认为是人类最高价值之一。
It is impossible to understand the devotion to individual liberty, or even the sceptical rationalism of figures like Kandiaronk, outside this larger historical context; or at least, that is what we propose to show in the rest of this chapter. Much though later European authors liked to imagine them as innocent children of nature, the indigenous populations of North America were in fact heirs to their own, long intellectual and political history – one that had taken them in a very different direction to Eurasian philosophers and which, arguably, ended up having a profound influence on conceptions of freedom and equality, not just in Europe but everywhere else as well.
在这个更大的历史背景之外,不可能理解对个人自由的奉献,甚至不可能理解像坎迪阿伦克这样的人物的怀疑理性主义;或者至少,这就是我们在本章的其余部分所要表明的。尽管后来的欧洲作家喜欢把他们想象成天真无邪的孩子,但北美的原住民实际上是他们自己漫长的知识和政治历史的继承者 —— 这段历史把他们带到了与欧亚哲学家非常不同的方向,可以说,这段历史最终对自由和平等的概念产生了深刻的影响,不仅是在欧洲,在其他地方也一样。
Of course, we are taught to treat such claims as inherently unlikely, even slightly preposterous. As we’ve seen in the case of Turgot, evolutionary theory as we know it today was largely created so as to entrench such dismissive attitudes: to make them seem natural or obvious. If the indigenous peoples of North America aren’t being imagined as living in a separate time, or as vestiges of some earlier stage of human history, then they’re imagined as living in an entirely separate reality (‘ontology’ is the currently fashionable term), a mythic consciousness fundamentally different from our own. If nothing else, it is assumed that any intellectual tradition similar to that which produced Plotinus, Shankara or Zhuang Zu can only be the product of a literary tradition in which knowledge becomes cumulative. And since North America did not produce a written tradition – or at least not the sort we are used to recognizing as such11 – any knowledge it generated, political or otherwise, was necessarily of a different kind. Any similarity we might see to debates or positions familiar from our own intellectual tradition is typically written off as some sort of naive projection of Western categories. Real dialogue is thus impossible.
当然,我们被教导要把这种说法视为本质上的不可能,甚至是略显荒谬的。正如我们在杜尔哥的案例中所看到的,我们今天所知道的进化论在很大程度上是为了巩固这种轻视的态度而创造的:使它们显得自然或明显。如果北美的原住民不是被想象成生活在一个独立的时代,或者是人类历史的某个早期阶段的残余,那么他们就被想象成生活在一个完全独立的现实(“本体论” 是目前流行的术语)中,一个与我们自己的神话意识根本不同。如果不出意外的话,它被认为任何类似于产生普罗提诺、商羯罗或庄子的知识传统只能是文学传统的产物,在这种传统中,知识成为累积。由于北美没有产生一个书面传统 —— 或者至少不是我们习惯于承认的那种传统11 —— 它所产生的任何知识,无论是政治的还是其他的,都必然是一种不同的知识。我们可能看到的与我们自己的知识传统中熟悉的辩论或立场的任何相似之处,通常被写成某种西方范畴的天真投影。因此,真正的对话是不可能的。
Perhaps the most straightforward way to counteract this sort of argument is by citing a text, which describes a concept the Wendat (Huron) called Ondinnonk, a secret desire of the soul manifested by a dream:
也许反驳这种论点的最直接方式是引用一段文字,其中描述了温达特人(休伦族)的一个概念,叫做 Ondinnonk,是一种通过梦境表现出来的灵魂的秘密欲望:
Hurons believe that our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and concealed … They believe that our soul makes these natural desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished, it is satisfied; but, on the contrary, if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry, and not only does not give its body the good and the happiness that it wished to procure for it, but often it also revolts against the body, causing various diseases, and even death.12
休伦人认为,我们的灵魂还有其他的欲望,这些欲望是与生俱来的,是隐藏的…… 他们认为,我们的灵魂通过梦境来了解这些自然的欲望,梦境是它的语言。因此,当这些欲望得到满足时,它就会得到满足;相反,如果它没有得到它所希望的东西,它就会变得愤怒,不仅不给它的身体以它希望获得的好处和幸福,而且还经常反抗身体,引起各种疾病,甚至死亡。12
The author goes on to explain that, in dreams, such secret desires are communicated in a kind of indirect, symbolic language, difficult to understand, and that the Wendat therefore spend a great deal of time trying to decipher the meaning of one another’s dreams, or consulting specialists.
作者继续解释说,在梦中,这种秘密的欲望是以一种间接的、象征性的语言传达的,很难理解,因此温达特人花了大量的时间,试图破译彼此的梦的含义,或者咨询专家。
All this might seem like an oddly clumsy projection of Freudian theory, but for one thing. The text is from 1649. It was written by a certain Father Ragueneau in a Jesuit Relation, precisely 250 years before the appearance of the first edition of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), an event which, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, is widely seen as one of the founding events of twentieth-century thought. What’s more, Ragueneau is not our only source. Numerous missionaries attempting to convert other Iroquoian peoples at the same time reported similar theories – which they considered absurd and obviously false (though probably, they concluded, not actually demonic) and attempted to refute, in order to bring their interlocutors around instead to the truth of Holy Scripture.
所有这些可能看起来像弗洛伊德理论的一个奇怪的笨拙的投影,但有一点。这段文字是 1649 年的。它是由某位 Ragueneau 神父在耶稣会关系中写的,正好比弗洛伊德的《梦的解析》(1899 年)第一版的出现早 250 年,这一事件与爱因斯坦的相对论一样,被广泛认为是二十世纪思想的奠基事件之一。更重要的是,拉格诺不是我们唯一的来源。在同一时期,许多试图使其他伊鲁克人皈依的传教士也报告了类似的理论 —— 他们认为这些理论是荒谬的,明显是错误的(尽管他们的结论是,可能实际上不是恶魔),并试图加以驳斥,以使他们的对话者转而接受圣经的真理。
Does this mean that the community in which Kandiaronk grew up was composed of Freudians? Not exactly. There were significant differences between Freudian psychoanalysis and Iroquoian practice, most dramatically in the collective nature of the therapy. ‘Dream-guessing’ was often carried out by groups, and realizing the desires of the dreamer, either literally or symbolically, could involve mobilizing an entire community: Ragueneau reported that the winter months in a Wendat town were largely devoted to organizing collective feasts and dramas, literally in order to make some important man or woman’s dreams come true. The point here is that it would be very unwise to dismiss such intellectual traditions as inferior – or for that matter, entirely alien – to our own.
这是否意味着坎迪阿伦克成长的社区是由弗洛伊德主义者组成的?并非如此。弗洛伊德的精神分析和伊鲁克的实践之间存在着重大的差异,最引人注目的是治疗的集体性质。“梦的猜测” 往往是由团体进行的,而实现梦者的愿望,无论是字面意义上的还是象征意义上的,都可能需要动员整个社区。Ragueneau 报告说,温达镇的冬季几个月主要用于组织集体宴会和戏剧,简直是为了使一些重要的男人或女人的梦想成真。这里的重点是,把这种知识传统当作低级的 —— 或者说是完全陌生的 —— 来否定我们自己的知识传统是非常不明智的。
One thing that makes the Wendat and Haudenosaunee unusual is that their traditions are so well documented: many other societies were either entirely destroyed, or reduced to traumatized remnants, long before any such records could be written down. One can only wonder what other intellectual traditions might thus have been forever lost. What we are going to do in the remainder of this chapter, then, is examine the history of the Eastern Woodlands of North America from roughly AD 200 to 1600 in exactly this light. Our aim here is to understand the local roots of the indigenous critique of European civilization, and how those roots were entangled in a history that began at Cahokia or perhaps even considerably earlier.
温达特人和豪德诺萨尼人不寻常的一点是,他们的传统有如此完备的记录:许多其他社会要么被完全摧毁,要么在任何此类记录能够被写下来之前就沦为受创伤的残余物。人们不禁要问,还有哪些知识传统可能因此而永远消失。那么,在本章的剩余部分,我们要做的正是从这个角度来考察北美东部林地从大约公元 200 年到 1600 年的历史。我们在这里的目的是了解本地人对欧洲文明的批评的根源,以及这些根源是如何与始于卡霍基亚或甚至更早的历史纠缠在一起的。
Let’s start with a puzzle. We’ve already had occasion to mention how the same basic repertoire of clan names could be found distributed more or less everywhere across Turtle Island (the indigenous name for the North American continent). There were endless local differences, but there were also consistent alliances, so that it was possible for a traveller hailing from a Bear, or Wolf or Hawk clan in what’s now Georgia to travel all the way to Ontario or Arizona and find someone obliged to host them at almost any point in between. This seems all the more remarkable when one considers that literally hundreds of different languages were spoken in North America, belonging to half a dozen completely unrelated language families. It hardly seems likely that clan systems were brought over, fully fledged, with the first human arrivals from Siberia; they must have developed in more recent times. But – and here’s our puzzle – considering the distances involved, it’s hard to imagine how that could have happened.
让我们从一个难题开始。我们已经有机会提到,在整个海龟岛(北美大陆的原住民名称)上,或多或少都能找到相同的基本宗族名称组合。当地有无穷无尽的差异,但也有一致的联盟,因此,一个来自现在佐治亚州的熊族、狼族或鹰族的旅行者,有可能一路走到安大略省或亚利桑那州,并在中间的任何地方找到有义务接待他们的人。如果考虑到北美地区有数百种不同的语言,属于半打完全不相关的语言家族,这就显得更加了不起了。氏族系统似乎不太可能随着第一批来自西伯利亚的人类的到来而完全成熟地被带过来;它们一定是在更近的时期发展的。但是 —— 这就是我们的难题 —— 考虑到所涉及的距离,很难想象这怎么可能发生。
As Elizabeth Tooker, doyenne of Iroquoian studies, pointed out back in the 1970s, this puzzle is all the more perplexing because it’s not entirely clear if North American clans should strictly be considered ‘kinship’ groups at all. They are more like ritual societies, each dedicated to maintaining a spiritual relation with a different totem animal which is usually only figuratively their ‘ancestor’. True, members are recruited by (matrilineal or patrilineal) descent, and fellow clan members consider one another brothers and sisters whom one therefore cannot marry. Yet nobody kept track of genealogies, and there were no ancestor cults or property claims based on descent: all clan members were, effectively, equal. There wasn’t even much in the way of collective property other than certain forms of ritual knowledge, dances or chants, bundles of sacred objects and also a collection of names.
正如伊鲁瓦克研究专家伊丽莎白·图克在 20 世纪 70 年代指出的那样,这个难题更加令人困惑,因为严格来说,北美的氏族是否应该被视为 “亲属” 群体并不完全清楚。它们更像是仪式社会,每个人都致力于与不同的图腾动物保持精神上的联系,而图腾动物通常只是象征性的 “祖先”。诚然,成员是按(母系或父系)血统招募的,同族成员认为彼此是兄弟和姐妹,因此不能结婚。然而,没有人跟踪家谱,也没有基于血统的祖先崇拜或财产要求:所有氏族成员实际上是平等的。除了某些形式的仪式知识、舞蹈或颂歌、成捆的圣物以及名字的收集之外,甚至没有什么集体财产的方式。
A clan typically had a fixed stock of names which were assigned to children. Some of these were chiefly names but, like the sacred paraphernalia, they were rarely directly inherited; instead, they were assigned to the most likely candidate when a title holder died. A community, moreover, was never made up of just one clan. There were usually quite a number, grouped together into two halves (or moieties), which acted as rivals and complements to one another, competing against one another in sports and burying one another’s dead. The overall effect was to efface personal histories from public contexts: since names were titles, it would be as if the head of one half of the community would always be John F. Kennedy and the other always Richard Nixon. This fusing of titles and names is a peculiarly North American phenomenon. Some version of it appears almost everywhere on Turtle Island, but almost nowhere else in the world do we see anything quite like it.
一个部族通常有固定的名字,分配给孩子。其中有些是主要的名字,但像神圣的,它们很少被直接继承;相反,当头衔持有者死亡时,它们被分配给最可能的候选人。此外,一个社区从来不是由一个部族组成的。通常有相当多的宗族,它们被分成两半(或称族群),既是竞争对手,又是彼此的补充,在运动中相互竞争,并埋葬彼此的死者。总体效果是将个人历史从公共环境中抹去:由于名字是头衔,就好像社区中的一半的首脑永远是约翰·F·肯尼迪,而另一半永远是理查德·尼克松。这种头衔和姓名的融合是一种特殊的北美现象。它的某种版本几乎出现在海龟岛上的任何地方,但在世界其他地方,我们几乎看不到任何与之相当的东西。
Finally, Tooker notes, clans played a key role in diplomacy: not just in providing hospitality to travellers, but organizing the protocol for diplomatic missions, the paying of compensation to prevent wars, or the incorporation of prisoners, who could simply be assigned a name and thereby become a clan member in their new community – even the replacement for someone who had died in that very conflict. The system appeared to be designed to maximize people’s capacity to move, individually or collectively, or for that matter to reshuffle social arrangements. Within these parameters there is an endless, almost kaleidoscopic range of possibilities. But where did this set of parameters come from in the first place? Tooker suggested it might be remnants of some long-forgotten ‘trading empire’, perhaps originally established by merchants from central Mexico, but the suggestion wasn’t taken seriously by her fellow scholars – her essay, in fact, is hardly ever cited. There is no evidence that any such trading empire ever existed.
最后,图克指出,氏族在外交方面发挥了关键作用:不仅为旅行者提供招待,而且组织外交使团的礼节,为防止战争而支付赔偿金,或纳入囚犯,他们可以简单地分配一个名字,从而成为新社区的一个氏族成员 —— 甚至替代在冲突中死亡的人。这个系统的设计似乎是为了最大限度地提高人们的迁移能力,无论是个人还是集体,或者为此重新调整社会安排。在这些参数中,有无尽的、几乎是万花筒式的可能性。但这套参数首先来自哪里?图克认为这可能是某个早已被遗忘的 “贸易帝国” 的遗留物,也许最初是由来自墨西哥中部的商人建立的,但这个建议并没有被她的同事们认真对待 —— 事实上,她的文章几乎没有被引用过。没有证据表明任何这样的贸易帝国曾经存在过。
It seems more reasonable to assume that a ritual and diplomatic system has its origins in, well, ritual and diplomacy. The first point where we have unmistakable evidence that such a phenomenon could have happened – that is, where active ties developed between virtually all parts of North America – lies in what archaeologists refer to as the ‘Hopewell Interaction Sphere’, a network with its epicentre in the Scioto and Paint Creek river valleys of Ohio. Between roughly 100 BC and AD 500, communities participating in this network deposited treasures under burial mounds, often piled up in extraordinary quantities. The treasures included quartz-crystal arrowheads, mica and obsidian from the Appalachians, copper and silver from the Great Lakes, conch shells and shark teeth from Gulf of Mexico, grizzly-bear molars from the Rockies, meteoric iron, alligator teeth, barracuda jaws and more.13 Most of these materials seem to have been used for the manufacture of ritual gear and magnificent costumes – including metal-sheathed pipes and mirrors – worn by shamans, priests and a host of minor officials in a complex organizational structure, the precise nature of which is fiendishly difficult to reconstruct.
假设一个仪式和外交体系起源于,嗯,仪式和外交,似乎更合理。我们有明确无误的证据证明这种现象可能发生 —— 也就是说,在北美几乎所有地区之间发展了积极的联系 —— 的第一点是考古学家所说的 “霍普韦尔互动圈”,这个网络的中心在俄亥俄州的 Scioto 和 Paint Creek 河谷。大约在公元前 100 年到公元 500 年之间,参与这个网络的社区在墓冢下沉积了宝物,通常堆积的数量非常大。这些宝物包括石英晶体箭头、阿巴拉契亚山脉的云母和黑曜石、大湖区的铜和银、墨西哥湾的海螺壳和鲨鱼牙齿、落基山脉的灰熊臼齿、陨铁、鳄鱼牙齿、梭鱼下颚等等。13这些材料中的大部分似乎都被用于制造仪式装备和华丽的服装 —— 包括金属鞘的管道和镜子 —— 由萨满、祭司和众多小官员在一个复杂的组织结构中穿戴,其确切的性质是难以重构的。
Even more striking, many of these tombs were located in the vicinity of gigantic earthworks, some literally miles across. The inhabitants of the Central Ohio valley had been creating such structures since the beginning of what archaeologists called the Adena period, around 1000 BC, and earthworks do also appear in earlier ‘Archaic’ phases of North American history. As we’ve already seen in the case of Poverty Point, whoever designed them was capable of making remarkably sophisticated astronomical calculations and employed accurate systems of measurement. One would imagine such people could also marshal and deploy enormous amounts of labour – although here we must be careful. Evidence from more recent times suggests that the tradition of mound-building could have been, in some cases, a side effect of creating dancing-grounds or other flat open spaces for feasts, games and assemblies. Each year before a major ritual these spaces would be swept and flattened, and the accumulated dirt and debris piled up in the same place. Over centuries, this could obviously become a very large amount of material to be shaped. Among the Muskogee, for example, such artificial hills would be covered each year by a new mantle of red, yellow, black or white earth. This work was organized by officials on rotating duties and did not require top-down structures of command.14
更令人震惊的是,这些墓葬中有许多位于巨大的土楼附近,有些土楼的宽度甚至达到数英里。俄亥俄州中部山谷的居民从考古学家所说的阿德纳时期开始就一直在建造这样的建筑,大约在公元前 1000 年,而且土方工程也出现在北美历史的早期 “古世纪” 阶段。正如我们在贫困点的案例中所看到的,设计这些建筑的人有能力进行非常复杂的天文计算并采用精确的测量系统。我们可以想象,这样的人也可以调集和部署大量的劳动力 —— 尽管在这里我们必须小心。近代的证据表明,在某些情况下,建造土丘的传统可能是为宴会、游戏和集会创造舞场或其他平坦空地的一个副作用。每年在举行重大仪式之前,这些地方都会被清扫和平整,积累的泥土和碎片也会堆放在同一个地方。几个世纪以来,这显然可以成为一个非常大量的材料被塑造出来。例如,在 Muskogee 人中,这种人造山丘每年都会被一层新的红、黄、黑或白土覆盖。这项工作是由轮流值班的官员组织的,不需要自上而下的指挥结构。14
Such is clearly not the case, however, with really large structures like Poverty Point or the Hopewell earthworks. These did not grow by slow accretion but were planned in advance. The most impressive sites are almost invariably in river valleys, typically quite close to bodies of water. They rise, literally, out of the sodden mud. As anyone who has played as a child with sand or mud (that is, pretty much anyone, including ancient Amerindians) will be aware, it’s easy to make structures out of such material, but almost impossible to keep them from crumbling or washing away again in damp locations. This is where the really impressive engineering comes in. A typical Hopewell site is a complex, mathematically aligned mix of circles, squares and octagons – all made of mud. One of the largest, the Newark Earthworks in Licking County, Ohio, which apparently functioned as a lunar observatory, extends over two square miles and contains embankments more than sixteen feet tall. The only way to create stable structures of this sort – so stable that they still exist today – was by the use of ingenious building techniques, alternating layers of earth with carefully selected gravels and sand.15 To anyone seeing them for the first time, rising above the swamps, the effect would be similar to witnessing an ice cube that refused ever to melt in the midday sun; a kind of cosmogonic miracle.
然而,像贫困点或霍普韦尔土楼这样真正的大型建筑显然不是这样的。这些建筑并不是通过缓慢的增殖而成长起来的,而是事先就计划好的。最令人印象深刻的遗址几乎都是在河谷中,通常离水体很近。它们实际上是从沾满泥土的淤泥中升起的。任何小时候玩过沙子或泥巴的人(也就是几乎所有的人,包括古代美洲印第安人)都会知道,用这种材料制作结构很容易,但要让它们在潮湿的地方不崩溃或再次被冲走几乎是不可能的。这就是真正令人印象深刻的工程的地方。一个典型的霍普韦尔遗址是一个复杂的、在数学上排列整齐的圆形、方形和八角形的混合体 —— 全部由泥土制成。其中最大的一个,位于俄亥俄州利克县的纽瓦克土方工程,显然是作为一个月球观测站使用的,它延伸超过两平方英里,包含超过 16 英尺高的堤岸。创造这种稳定结构的唯一方法 —— 如此稳定,以至于它们今天仍然存在 —— 是通过使用巧妙的建筑技术,将土层与精心挑选的砾石和沙子交替使用。15对任何第一次看到它们的人来说,在沼泽地上升起的效果类似于看到一个在正午阳光下永远不会融化的冰块;一种宇宙的奇迹。
We’ve already mentioned how researchers calculating the maths were startled to discover that, from the Archaic phase onwards, geometric earthworks across large parts of the Americas appear to have been using the same system of measurement: one apparently based on the arrangement of cords into equilateral triangles. So the fact that people and materials were converging from far and wide upon the Hopewell mound complexes is not in itself extraordinary. Yet as archaeologists have also observed, the geometric systems characteristic of the ‘Woodland peoples’ who created Hopewell also mark something of a break with past custom: the introduction of a different metrical system, and a new geometry of forms.16
我们已经提到,研究人员在计算数学时惊奇地发现,从太古阶段开始,美洲大部分地区的几何土楼似乎都在使用相同的测量系统:显然是基于将绳索排列成等边三角形。因此,人员和材料从很远的地方汇聚到霍普韦尔土丘群的事实本身并不特别。然而,正如考古学家所观察到的,创造霍普韦尔的 “林地人” 所特有的几何系统也标志着与过去习俗的决裂:引入了不同的度量衡系统,以及新的几何形式。16
Central Ohio was just the epicentre. Sites with earthworks based on this new, Hopewellian geometrical system can be found dotted along the upper and lower reaches of the Mississippi valley. Some are the size of small towns. They might, and often did, contain meeting houses, craft workshops and charnel houses for the processing of human remains, along with crypts for the dead. A few might have had resident caretakers, though this isn’t entirely clear. What is clear is that for most of the year these sites remained largely or completely empty. Only on specific ritual occasions did they come to life as theatres for elaborate ceremonies, densely populated for a week or two at a time, with people drawn from across the region and occasional visitors from very far away.
俄亥俄州中部只是一个震中。在密西西比河谷的上游和下游地区,可以发现有基于这种新的霍普韦利几何系统的土方工程遗址。有些遗址的规模相当于小城镇。它们可能,而且经常包含会议厅、手工艺作坊和用于处理人类遗体的墓地,以及死者的墓穴。有几个可能有常驻看守人,尽管这一点并不完全清楚。明确的是,在一年中的大部分时间里,这些场所基本上或完全是空的。只有在特定的祭祀场合,它们才会作为精心设计的仪式的舞台而活跃起来,每次都有一两个星期的密集人群,他们来自整个地区,偶尔也有来自很远地方的游客。
This is another of the puzzles of Hopewell. It had all the elements required to create a classic ‘grain state’ (as Scott would define it). The Scioto-Paint Creek bottomlands, where the largest centres were built, are so fertile they later came to be nicknamed ‘Egypt’ by European settlers; and at least some of the inhabitants will have been familiar with maize cultivation. But in the same way that they appear to have largely avoided this crop – except perhaps for limited, ritual purposes – they also largely avoided the valley bottoms, preferring to live in isolated homesteads scattered across the landscape and mostly on higher ground. Such homesteads often consisted of a single family; or, at most, three or four. Sometimes these tiny groups moved back and forth between summer and winter houses, pursuing a combination of hunting, fishing, foraging and cultivating local weedy crops in small garden plots; sunflowers, sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed and maygrass, along with a smattering of vegetables.17 Presumably people were in regular contact with their neighbours. They seem to have got on with them well enough, since there is little evidence for warfare or organized violence of any sort.18 But they never came together to create any sort of ongoing village or town life.19
这是霍普韦尔的另一个难题。它拥有创造一个典型的 “谷物国家”(正如斯科特所定义的)所需的所有元素。建有最大中心的 Scioto-Paint Creek 底地非常肥沃,后来被欧洲定居者戏称为 “埃及”;而且至少有些居民熟悉玉米种植。但与此相同的是,他们似乎在很大程度上避免种植这种作物 —— 也许是为了有限的、仪式性的目的 —— 他们也在很大程度上避免在谷底居住,更愿意居住在散布在地势较高处的孤立的家园里。这样的家园往往由一个家庭组成;或者,最多三四个。有时,这些小群体在夏季和冬季的房屋之间来回移动,从事狩猎、捕鱼、觅食和在小块园地里种植当地的杂草作物;向日葵、闾丘露水、鹅掌柴、结缕草和五月草,以及少量的蔬菜。17据推测,人们经常与他们的邻居保持联系。他们似乎与他们相处得很好,因为几乎没有证据表明有战争或任何形式的有组织暴力。18但他们从来没有走到一起,创造任何一种持续的村庄或城镇生活。19
Monumental architecture on the scale of the Hopewell earthworks is generally assumed to imply a significant agricultural surplus, governed by chiefs or a stratum of religious leaders. Yet this isn’t what was going on. Rather we find just the sort of ‘play farming’ familiar from our discussions in Chapter Six, as well as shamans and engineers who spent the overwhelming majority of their time with the same five or six companions, but who periodically walked out on to the stage of an extended society that encompassed much of the North American continent. It is all so strikingly different from anything we know of later Woodlands societies that it’s difficult to reconstruct exactly what these settlement patterns meant in practice. If nothing else, however, this overall situation illustrates the profound irrelevance of a conventional evolutionist terminology, based on a progression from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’ and ‘chiefdoms’.
像霍普韦尔土楼这样规模的纪念性建筑,一般被认为意味着有大量的农业剩余,由酋长或宗教领袖阶层管理。然而,这并不是正在发生的事情。相反,我们发现我们在第六章的讨论中所熟悉的那种 “游戏农业”,以及萨满和工程师,他们绝大部分时间都是和五六个同伴在一起,但他们会定期走到一个扩展的社会舞台上,包括北美大陆的大部分。这一切与我们所知道的后来的林地社会是如此惊人的不同,以至于很难重建这些定居模式在实践中意味着什么。然而,如果没有别的原因,这种总体情况说明了传统的进化论术语的深刻的不相关性,这种术语是基于从 “部落” 到 “酋长国” 的进展。
So what kind of societies were these?
那么,这些社会是什么样的社会?
One thing we can definitely say is that they were artistically brilliant. For all their modest living arrangements, Hopewellians produced one of the most sophisticated repertories of imagery in the pre-Columbian Americas: everything from effigy pipes topped by exquisite animal carvings (used to smoke a variety of tobacco strong enough to induce trance-like states, along with other herbal concoctions); to fired earthen jars covered in elaborate designs; and small copper sheets, worn as breastplates, cut into intricate geometrical designs. Much of the imagery is evocative of shamanic ritual, vision quests and soul journeys (as we noted, there is a particular emphasis on mirrors), but also periodic festivals of the dead.
有一点我们可以肯定地说,他们在艺术上是非常出色的。尽管他们的生活安排并不富裕,但霍普韦利人却创造了前哥伦布时期最复杂的图像库之一美洲:从顶端有精致动物雕刻的烟斗(用于吸食足以诱发恍惚状态的各种烟草,以及其他草药混合物),到覆盖着精心设计的烧制土罐,以及切割成复杂的几何图形的小铜片,作为胸牌佩戴。许多图像让人联想到萨满教仪式、幻觉探索和灵魂之旅(正如我们所指出的,这里特别强调镜子),但也有定期的亡灵节。
Like Chavín de Huántar in the Andes, or indeed Poverty Point, social influence derived from control over esoteric forms of knowledge. The main difference is that the Hopewell Interaction Sphere has no discernible centre, no single capital, and unlike Chavín it offers little evidence for the existence of permanent elites, priestly or otherwise. Analysis of burials reveals at least a dozen different sets of insignia, ranging perhaps from funerary priests to clan chief or diviner. Remarkably, it also appears to reveal the existence of a developed clan system, since the ancient inhabitants of central Ohio developed the historically unusual – but from an archaeologist’s point of view extraordinarily convenient – habit of including bits of their totem animal – jaws, teeth, claws or talons, often fashioned into pendants or jewellery – in their tombs. All the clans most familiar from later North America – Deer, Wolf, Elk, Hawk, Snake and so on – were already represented.20 The really striking thing is that, despite the existence of a system of offices and clans, there appears to be virtually no relation between the two. It is possible that clans sometimes ‘owned’ certain offices, but there is little evidence for the existence of a hereditary, ranked elite.21
如同安第斯山脉的 Chavín de Huántar,或者实际上是 “贫困点”,社会影响来自于对神秘知识形式的控制。主要的区别是,霍普韦尔互动圈没有明显的中心,没有单一的首都,而且与查文不同,它几乎没有提供证据证明存在永久性的精英,无论是牧师还是其他。对墓葬的分析显示,至少有十几套不同的徽章,范围可能从葬仪祭司到氏族首领或占卜师。值得注意的是,它似乎还揭示了一个发达的氏族系统的存在,因为俄亥俄州中部的古代居民养成了历史上不寻常的 —— 但从考古学家的角度看却异常方便的 —— 习惯,在他们的坟墓中包括他们图腾动物的碎片 —— 颚、牙、爪或爪子,通常被塑造成吊坠或珠宝。在后来的北美,所有最熟悉的氏族 —— 鹿、狼、麋鹿、鹰、蛇等等 —— 都已经有了代表。20真正令人震惊的是,尽管存在办公室和氏族的制度,但这两者之间似乎没有任何关系。氏族有时可能 “拥有” 某些办公室,但几乎没有证据表明存在一个世袭的、有等级的精英阶层。21
Some suggest that much of Hopewell ritual consisted of heroic-style feasts and contests: races, games and gambling, which – if at all like later Feasts of the Dead in the American Northeast – often ended by covering great treasures beneath carefully layered strata of soil and gravel, so that nobody (except, perhaps, gods or spirits) would ever see them again.22 Both the games and burials would, obviously, tend to militate against the accumulation of wealth – or, better put, would ensure that social differences remained largely theatrical. Indeed, even those systemic differences that can be detected seem to be an effect of the ritual system, for the Hopewell heartland appears to break down into a Tripartite Alliance, three great clusters of sites.
有些人认为,霍普韦尔仪式的大部分内容是英雄式的盛宴和竞赛:比赛、游戏和赌博,这些活动 —— 如果与后来美洲东北部的亡灵节一样 —— 往往以将巨大的财宝覆盖在精心分层的土壤和砾石之下而告终,这样就没有人(也许除了神或灵魂)会再看到它们。22显然,游戏和埋葬都倾向于反对财富的积累 —— 或者,更确切地说,将确保社会差异在很大程度上保持戏剧性。事实上,即使是那些可以检测到的系统性差异,似乎也是仪式系统的影响,因为霍普韦尔中心区似乎被分解成了一个三方联盟,即三个伟大的遗址群落。
In the northernmost, centred on Hopewell itself, funerary assemblages focus on shamanic ritual, heroic male figures travelling between cosmic domains. In the southern, best exemplified by the Turner Site in southwest Ohio, the emphasis is on an imagery of impersonal masked figures, hilltop earth shrines and chthonic monsters. Still more remarkably, in the northern cluster all those buried with badges of office are men; in the southern, those buried with the same badges of office are just as exclusively women. (The central cluster of sites is mixed, in both respects.)23 What’s more, there was clearly some kind of systemic co-ordination between the clusters, with causeways joining them.24
在最北端,以霍普韦尔本身为中心,墓葬组合的重点是萨满教仪式,英雄般的男性形象在宇宙领域之间旅行。在南部,以俄亥俄州西南部的特纳遗址为例,强调的是非个人化的蒙面人物、山顶土神庙和神怪的意象。更值得注意的是,在北方的遗址群中,所有佩戴官职徽章的人都是男性;而在南方,佩戴同样官职徽章的人也都是女性。(中央的遗址群在这两方面都是混合的)。23更重要的是,各群之间显然存在着某种系统性的协调,有便道连接着它们。24
It’s informative, at this point, to compare and contrast the Hopewell Interaction Sphere with a phenomenon we discussed in the previous chapter: the ‘Ubaid village societies of Mesopotamia in the fifth millennium BC . The comparison might seem a stretch, but both can be conceived as culture areas on the grandest possible scale, the first in their respective hemispheres to encompass the entire span of a great river system – the Mississippi and the Euphrates respectively – from headwaters to delta, including all the surrounding plains and coastlands.25 The establishment of regular cultural interaction on such a scale, across sharply contrasting landscapes and environmental niches, often marks an important turning point in history. In the case of the ‘Ubaid it created a certain self-conscious form of standardization, a social egalitarianism, that laid foundations for the world’s first cities.26 What happened in the case of Hopewell seems rather different.
在这一点上,将霍普韦尔互动圈与我们在上一章中讨论的一个现象进行对比是很有意义的:公元前五千年美索不达米亚的 “乌拜德” 村社会。这种比较似乎有些牵强,但两者都可以被看作是规模最大的文化区,是各自半球中第一个涵盖整个大河系统 —— 分别是密西西比河和幼发拉底河 —— 从源头到三角洲,包括所有周边平原和海岸的文化区。25在这样的规模上建立定期的文化互动,跨越截然不同的地貌和环境利基,往往标志着历史的一个重要转折点。就乌拜德人而言,它创造了某种自觉的标准化形式,一种社会平等主义,为世界上第一批城市奠定了基础。26发生在霍普韦尔的情况似乎相当不同。
In fact, in many ways Hopewell and ‘Ubaid are polar cultural opposites. The unity of the ‘Ubaid interaction sphere lay in the suppression of individual differences between people and households; in contrast, the unity of Hopewell lay in the celebration of difference. To take one example: while later North American societies would distinguish entire clans and nations by characteristic hairstyles (so it was a simple matter to distinguish a Seneca, Onondaga or Mohawk warrior at a distance), it is difficult to find two figures in Hopewell art – and there are quite a few of them – that have the same hair. Everybody appears to have been free to make a spectacle of themselves, or to obtain some dramatic role in the theatre of society, and this individual expressiveness was reflected in miniature depictions of people sporting what seem to be an endless variety of playful, idiosyncratic styles of haircut, clothing and ornamentation.27
事实上,在许多方面,霍普韦尔和 “乌拜德” 是两极的文化对立。乌拜德互动领域的统一性在于抑制人与人之间和家庭之间的个体差异;相反,霍普韦尔的统一性在于对差异的庆祝。举个例子:虽然后来的北美社会会通过特有的发型来区分整个部族和国家(所以在远处区分塞内卡、奥农达加或莫霍克战士是一件很简单的事情),但在霍普韦尔艺术中很难找到两个头发相同的人物 —— 而且其中有相当多的人。每个人似乎都可以自由地展示自己,或者在社会的舞台上获得一些戏剧性的角色,这种个人的表现力反映在人们的微型描绘中,似乎有无穷无尽的各种有趣的、特异的发型、服装和装饰风格。27
Yet all this was intricately co-ordinated over large areas. Even locally, each earthwork was one element in a continuous ritual landscape. The earthworks’ alignments often reference particular segments of the Hopewell calendar (such as the solstices, phases of the moon and so on), with people presumably having to move back and forth regularly between the monuments to complete a full ceremonial cycle. This is complex: one can only imagine the kind of detailed knowledge of stars, rivers and seasons that would have been required to co-ordinate people from hundreds of miles away, such that they might congregate on time for rituals in centres that lasted only for periods of five or six days at a time, over the course of a year. Let alone what it would take to actually transform such a system across the length and breadth of a continent.
然而,所有这些都是在大范围内错综复杂地协调的。即使在当地,每个土方工程也是一个连续的仪式景观中的一个元素。土方工程的排列经常参考霍普韦尔历法的特定部分(如至日、月相等),人们可能必须在纪念碑之间定期来回移动,以完成一个完整的仪式周期。这很复杂:我们可以想象,要协调数百英里外的人们,使他们能够准时聚集在一年中只持续五或六天的中心举行仪式,需要对星星、河流和季节有多么详细的了解。更不用说在整个大陆的长度和广度上实际改造这样一个系统所需要的东西了。
In later times, Feasts of the Dead were also occasions for the ‘resurrection’ of names, as the titles of those who were now gone passed to the living. It may have been through some such mechanisms that Hopewell disseminated the basic structure of its clan system across North America. It’s even possible that when the spectacular burials in Hopewell came to an end around AD 400, it was largely because Hopewell’s work was done. The idiosyncratic nature of its ritual art, for instance, gave way to standardized versions disseminated across the continent; while great treks to fantastic, temporary capitals that rose miraculously from the mud were no longer required to establish ties between groups, who now had a shared idiom for personal diplomacy, a common set of rules for interacting with strangers.28
在后来的时代,亡灵节也是名字 “复活” 的场合,因为那些已经去世的人的头衔传给了活人。霍普韦尔可能就是通过这样的机制,将其氏族系统的基本结构传播到整个北美。甚至有可能,当霍普韦尔壮观的墓葬在公元 400 年左右结束时,主要是因为霍普韦尔的工作已经完成。例如,其仪式艺术的特异性让位于在整个大陆传播的标准化版本;同时,不再需要长途跋涉到从泥土中奇迹般地升起的梦幻般的临时首都来建立群体之间的联系,他们现在有一个共同的个人外交成语,一套与陌生人互动的共同规则。28
One of the many puzzles of Hopewell is how its social arrangements seem to anticipate much later institutions. There was a division between ‘white’ and ‘red’ clans: the first identified with summer, circular houses and peacemaking; the second with winter, square houses and warfare.29 Most later indigenous societies had a separation between peace chiefs and war chiefs: an entirely different administration came into force in times of military conflict, then melted away as soon as matters were resolved. Some of this symbolism appears to originate in Hopewell. Archaeologists even identify certain figures as war chiefs; and yet, despite all this, there is an almost total lack of evidence for actual warfare. One possibility is that conflict took a different, more theatrical form – as in later times, when rival nations or ‘enemy’ moieties would often play out their hostilities through aggressive games of lacrosse.30
霍普韦尔的许多谜团之一是它的社会安排似乎预示着后来的制度。在 “白色” 和 “红色” 部族之间存在着一种划分:第一个部族与夏季、圆形房屋,以及建立和平有关;第二个部族与冬季、方形房屋和战争有关。29大多数后来的土著社会都有和平首领和战争首领之分:在军事冲突时期,一个完全不同的管理机构开始生效,然后在事情解决后立即消亡。这种象征性的东西有的似乎起源于霍普韦尔。考古学家甚至认定某些人物是战争首领;然而,尽管如此,几乎完全缺乏实际战争的证据。一种可能性是,冲突采取了不同的、更有戏剧性的形式 —— 就像在后来的时代,敌对的国家或 “敌人” 部落经常通过长曲棍球的侵略性游戏来表现他们的敌对行动。30
In the centuries following the decline of the Hopewell centres, roughly from AD 400 to 800, we start to see a series of familiar developments. First, some groups begin adopting maize as a staple crop and growing it in river valleys along the Mississippi floodplain. Second, actual armed conflict becomes more frequent. In at least some places, this led to populations living for longer periods around their local earthworks. Especially in the Mississippi valley and on adjacent bluffs, a pattern emerged of small towns centred on earthen pyramids and plazas, some fortified, often surrounded by extensive stretches of no-man’s-land. A few came to resemble tiny kingdoms. Eventually this situation led to a veritable urban explosion with its epicentre at the site of Cahokia, which was soon to become the greatest city in the Americas north of Mexico.
在霍普韦尔中心衰落后的几个世纪里,大约从公元 400 年到 800 年,我们开始看到一系列熟悉的发展。首先,一些群体开始采用玉米作为主食,并在密西西比河漫滩的河谷中种植玉米。第二,实际的武装冲突变得更加频繁。至少在一些地方,这导致人口在他们当地的土楼周围生活的时间更长。特别是在密西西比河谷和邻近的悬崖上,出现了一种以土制金字塔和广场为中心的小城镇模式,有些是设防的,往往被大片的无人区所包围。有几个小镇就像一个小王国。最终,这种情况导致了名副其实的城市爆炸,其震中位于卡霍基亚,它很快成为墨西哥以北美洲最大的城市。
Cahokia lies in an extensive floodplain along the Mississippi known as the American Bottom. It was a bounteous and fertile environment, ideal for growing maize, but still a challenging place to build a city since much of it was swampland, foggy and full of shallow pools. Charles Dickens, who once visited this place, described it as ‘an unbroken slough of black mud and water’. In Mississippian cosmology, watery places like this were connected to the chaotic underworld – seen as the diametrical opposite of a precise, predictable celestial order – and it’s no doubt significant that some of the first large-scale construction at Cahokia centred on a processional walkway known as the Rattlesnake Causeway, designed to rise from the surrounding waters and leading towards the surrounding ridge-top tombs (a Path of Souls, or Way of the Dead). To begin with, then, Cahokia was likely a place of pilgrimage, much like some of the Hopewell sites.31
卡霍基亚位于密西西比河沿岸一个广阔的洪泛区,被称为美洲底部。这是一个丰饶而肥沃的环境,是种植玉米的理想之地,但仍然是一个具有挑战性的地方,因为它的大部分是沼泽地,多雾,充满了浅水潭。查尔斯·狄更斯(Charles Dickens)曾经访问过这个地方,他将其描述为 “一个不间断的黑泥和水的泥沼”。在密西西比人的宇宙观中,像这样多水的地方与混乱的冥界有关 —— 被视为与精确的、可预测的天体秩序截然相反 —— 而且毫无疑问,卡霍基亚最早的一些大规模建筑集中在一条被称为响尾蛇堤的游行通道上,旨在从周围的水中升起,通往周围山脊顶上的墓穴(灵魂之路,或死者之路)。那么,首先,卡霍基亚可能是一个朝圣的地方,就像霍普韦尔的一些遗址一样。31
Its inhabitants also shared with Hopewell the same love of games. Around AD 600, someone living at Cahokia or close by seems to have come up with the idea for chunkey, later to become one of the most popular sports in North America. Chunkey was a complex and highly co-ordinated affair in which running players tried to throw poles as close as possible to a rolling wheel or ball without actually touching it.32 It was played at several earthwork sites that sprang up along the American Bottom: one way of holding together the increasingly disparate groups of people who came to settle there. In social terms, it had certain things in common with Mesoamerican ball games, though the rules were entirely different. It could be either a substitute for, or continuation of, war; it was tied into legend (in this case, the story of Red Horn the Morning Star who, much like the Maya hero-twins, confronted gods of the underworld); and it could become the focus of frenetic gambling, when some would even raise themselves or their families as stakes.33
它的居民也与霍普韦尔人一样热爱游戏。大约在公元 600 年,住在卡霍基亚或附近的人似乎想出了 “春基” 的主意,后来成为北美最流行的运动之一。春秋棋是一种复杂的、高度协调的活动,在这种活动中,奔跑的玩家试图将杆子尽可能地靠近一个滚动的轮子或球,而不实际接触到它。32这项运动是在沿着美洲底层涌现的几个土方工地上进行的:这是一种将来到那里定居的越来越多的不同群体团结起来的方式。在社会方面,它与中美洲的球类游戏有某些共同之处,尽管规则完全不同。它可以是战争的替代品,也可以是战争的延续;它与传说联系在一起(在这种情况下,是晨星红角的故事,他与玛雅英雄双胞胎一样,与冥界之神对抗);它可以成为狂热的赌博的焦点,当时有些人甚至会把自己或家人作为赌注。33
In Cahokia and its hinterland we can chart the rise of social hierarchies through the lens of chunkey, as the game became increasingly monopolized by an exclusive elite. One sign of this is how stone chunkey discs disappear from ordinary burials, just as beautifully crafted versions of them start to appear in the richest graves. Chunkey was becoming a spectator sport, and Cahokia the sponsor of a new regional, Mississippian elite. We are not sure exactly how it happened – as an act of religious revelation, perhaps – but around AD 1050 Cahokia exploded in size, growing from a fairly modest community to a city of over six square miles, including more than 100 earthen mounds built around spacious plazas. Its original population of a few thousand was augmented by perhaps 10,000 more, coming from outside to settle in Cahokia and its satellite towns, totalling something in the order of 40,000 in the American Bottom as a whole.34
在卡霍基亚及其腹地,我们可以通过春秋彩票娱乐平台的镜头来描绘社会等级制度的崛起,因为春秋彩票娱乐平台越来越多地被独家精英所垄断。这方面的一个迹象是,石制的春秋盘如何从普通的墓葬中消失,而制作精美的春秋盘却开始出现在最富有的墓葬中。秦键正在成为一项观赏性的运动,而卡霍基亚是一个新的地区性的密西西比精英的赞助商。我们不确定它到底是如何发生的 —— 也许是作为一种宗教启示的行为 —— 但在公元 1050 年左右,卡霍基亚的规模爆发了,从一个相当小的社区发展到一个超过 6 平方英里的城市,包括围绕宽敞的广场建造的 100 多个土丘。它原来的几千人的人口又增加了一万多人,他们从外面来到卡霍基亚及其卫星城镇定居,整个美洲底层的人口总数约为 4 万人。34
The main part of the city was designed and built according to a master plan in a single burst of activity. Its focus was a huge packed-earth pyramid known today as Monk’s Mound, standing before an enormous plaza. In a smaller plaza to the west stood a ‘woodhenge’ of cypress posts marking out the sun’s annual course. Some of Cahokia’s pyramids were topped with palaces or temples; others with charnel houses or sweat lodges. A calculated effort was made to resettle foreign populations – or at least their most important, influential representatives – in newly designed thatch houses, arranged in neighbourhoods around smaller plazas and earthen pyramids; many had their own craft specializations or ethnic identity.35 From the summit of Monk’s Mound the city’s ruling elite enjoyed powers of surveillance over these planned residential zones.36 At the same time, existing villages and hamlets in Cahokia’s hinterland were disbanded and the rural population dispersed, scattered in homesteads of one or two families.37
城市的主要部分是根据一个总体规划设计和建造的,一气呵成。它的重点是一个巨大的包土金字塔,今天被称为 “僧冢”,矗立在一个巨大的广场上。在西边的一个较小的广场上,矗立着一个由柏树柱子组成的 “木柱”,标出了太阳每年的走向。卡霍基亚的一些金字塔顶部有宫殿或庙宇;其他的则是丧尸房或汗蒸房。经过深思熟虑的努力,外来人口 —— 或者至少是他们最重要、最有影响力的代表,被安置在新设计的茅草房里,围绕着较小的广场和土质金字塔排列成街区;许多人有自己的工艺专长或种族特征。35从僧冢的山顶上,城市的统治精英们享有对这些规划好的住宅区的监督权。36同时,卡霍基亚腹地现有的村庄和小村落被解散,农村人口被驱散,分散在一两户人家的宅基地上。37
What’s so striking about this pattern is its suggestion of an almost complete dismantling of any self-governing communities outside the city. For those who fell within its orbit, there was nothing much left between domestic life – lived under constant surveillance from above – and the awesome spectacle of the city itself.38 That spectacle could be terrifying. Along with games and feasts, in the early decades of Cahokia’s expansion there were mass executions and burials, carried out in public. As with fledgling kingdoms in other parts of the world, these large-scale killings were directly associated with the funerary rites of nobility; in this case, a mortuary facility centred on the paired burials of high-status males and females,39 whose shrouded bodies were placed around a surface built up from some thousands of shell beads. Around them an earthen mound was formed, precisely oriented to an azimuth derived from the southernmost rising point of the moon. Its contents included four mass graves holding the stacked bodies of mainly young women (though one was over fifty), who were killed specifically for the occasion.40
这种模式的惊人之处在于,它暗示着城市之外的任何自治社区几乎被完全瓦解。对于那些落入城市轨道的人来说,在家庭生活 —— 生活在来自上层的持续监视之下 —— 和城市本身令人敬畏的景象之间没有留下什么。38这种景象可能是可怕的。在卡霍基亚扩张的最初几十年里,除了游戏和宴会之外,还有大规模的处决和埋葬,而且是公开进行的。与世界其他地区的新兴王国一样,这些大规模的杀戮与贵族的葬礼仪式直接相关;在这种情况下,停尸设施的核心是成对地埋葬地位高的男性和女性。39他们被包裹着的尸体被放置在一个由数千颗贝壳珠子组成的表面周围。在他们周围形成了一个土堆,其方向精确到月球最南端的升起点的方位。其内容包括四个万人坑,里面堆放的主要是年轻妇女的尸体(虽然有一个超过 50 岁),她们是专门为这个场合而被杀害的。40
Carefully sifting through the ethnographic and historical evidence, scholars have reconstructed the outlines of what Cahokia – and later kingdoms modelled on it – must have looked like. While something endured of the earlier clan organizations, the old moiety system was transformed into an opposition between nobles and commoners. The Mississippians appear to have been matrilineal, which meant that a mico (ruler) was not succeeded by his children but by his eldest nephew. Nobles could only marry commoners, and after several generations of such intermarriage the descendants of kings might lose their noble status entirely. So a pool of nobles-turned-commoners always existed from which warriors and administrators could be drawn. Genealogies were carefully preserved, and there was a priesthood devoted to maintaining the temples, which contained images of royal ancestors. Lastly, there was a system of titles for heroic achievement in war, which made it possible for commoners to win their way into the nobility, a status symbolized in bird-man imagery, which also invoked the prestige of competing at chunkey tournaments.41
通过对人种学和历史证据的仔细筛选,学者们重建了卡霍基亚 —— 以及后来以它为原型的王国 —— 的轮廓。虽然早期的氏族组织仍然存在,但旧的氏族系统已经转变为贵族和平民之间的对立。密西西比人似乎是母系社会,这意味着mico(统治者)不是由其子女而是由其长侄继承。贵族只能与平民结婚,经过几代人的这种通婚,国王的后代可能会完全失去他们的贵族地位。因此,总是有一批由贵族转为平民的人存在,可以从中抽取战士和行政人员。家谱被小心翼翼地保存着,还有一个专门维护神庙的神职人员,神庙里有皇家祖先的图像。最后,有一个为战争中的英雄成就而设立的头衔系统,这使得平民有可能赢得进入贵族阶层的机会,这种地位在鸟人形象中得到了象征,这也唤起了在 chunkey 锦标赛中竞争的威望。41
Bird-man symbolism was especially marked in the smaller kingdoms – some fifty in all – that began to appear up and down the Mississippi, of which the largest are at places called Etowah, Moundville and Spiro. The rulers of these towns were often buried with what seem to be precious badges and insignia manufactured at Cahokia. Sacred images in Cahokia itself focused not so much on the hawk and falcon symbolism that appeared everywhere else as – fittingly for an increasingly prominent centre of intensive grain production – on the figure of the Corn Mother, who also appears as the Old Woman, a goddess holding a loom. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Mississippian sites with links of various kinds to Cahokia appear everywhere from Virginia to Minnesota, often in aggressive conflict with their neighbours. Trade routes spanning the continent were activated, the materials for new treasures pouring into the American Bottom much as they once had to Hopewell.42
鸟人的象征意义在密西西比河上下游开始出现的小王国 —— 总共约 50 个 —— 中特别明显,其中最大的是在称为埃托瓦、蒙德维尔和斯皮罗的地方。这些城镇的统治者经常被埋葬在似乎是在卡霍基亚制造的珍贵徽章和标志上。卡霍基亚的圣像并不像其他地方那样注重鹰和隼的象征意义,而是注重玉米母亲的形象 —— 对于一个日益突出的集约化谷物生产中心来说是非常合适的,她也作为老妇人出现,是一个手持织机的女神。在第十一和第十二世纪,从弗吉尼亚州到明尼苏达州,到处都出现了与卡霍基亚有各种联系的密西西比人遗址,他们经常与邻国发生激烈的冲突。横跨大陆的贸易路线被激活,新的宝藏的材料涌入美洲底层,就像它们曾经涌入霍普韦尔一样。42
Very little of this expansion was directly controlled from the centre. We are unlikely to be talking about an actual empire so much as an intricate ritual alliance, backed up ultimately by force – and things began to grow increasingly violent, fairly fast. Within a century of the initial urban explosion at Cahokia, in about AD 1150, a giant palisaded wall was built, though it only included some parts of the city and not others. This marked the beginning of a long and uneven process of war, destruction and depopulation. At first people seem to have fled the metropolis for the hinterlands, then ultimately abandoned the rural bottomlands entirely.43 This same process can be observed in many of the smaller Mississippian towns. Most appear to have begun as co-operative enterprises before becoming centralized around the cult of some royal line and receiving patronage from Cahokia. Then, over the course of a century or two, they emptied out (in much the same way as the Natchez Great Village was later to do, and possibly for much the same reasons, as subjects sought freer lives elsewhere) until finally being sacked, burned or simply deserted.
这种扩张很少是由中央直接控制的。我们所谈论的不可能是一个真正的帝国,而是一个错综复杂的仪式联盟,最终以武力为后盾 —— 事情开始变得越来越暴力,而且速度相当快。在卡霍基亚最初的城市爆炸的一个世纪内,大约在公元 1150 年,一个巨大的围墙被建造起来,尽管它只包括城市的某些部分,而不是其他部分。这标志着一个漫长而不平衡的战争、破坏和人口减少过程的开始。起初,人们似乎从大都市逃往腹地,然后最终完全放弃了农村底层。43在许多较小的密西西比州城镇中也可以看到同样的过程。大多数城镇在开始时都是合作企业,然后围绕着某个王族的崇拜集中起来,并接受卡霍基亚的赞助。然后,在一两个世纪的时间里,它们被清空(与纳奇兹大村后来的情况差不多,可能也是出于同样的原因,因为臣民们在其他地方寻求更自由的生活),直到最后被洗劫、烧毁或干脆被遗弃。
Whatever happened in Cahokia, it appears to have left extremely unpleasant memories. Along with much of its bird-man mythology, the place was erased from any later oral traditions. After AD 1400 the entire fertile expanse of the American Bottom (which at the city’s height had contained perhaps as many as 40,000 people), along with the territory from Cahokia up to the Ohio River, became what’s referred to in the literature as the Vacant or Empty Quarter: a haunted wilderness of overgrown pyramids and housing blocks crumbling back into swamp, occasionally traversed by hunters but devoid of permanent human settlement.44
无论在卡霍基亚发生了什么,它似乎都留下了极其不愉快的记忆。连同它的大部分鸟人神话,这个地方被从后来的口头传统中抹去了。公元 1400 年后,整个肥沃的美洲底部地区(在城市的鼎盛时期,可能有多达 4 万人),以及从卡霍基亚到俄亥俄河的领土,变成了文献中所说的空置区或空旷区:一个由杂草丛生的金字塔和房屋区崩塌成沼泽的闹鬼荒野,偶尔有猎人穿过,但没有永久的人类定居。44
Scholars continue to debate the relative importance of ecological and social factors in Cahokia’s collapse, just as they argue about whether or not it should be considered a ‘complex chiefdom’ or a ‘state’.45 In our own terms (as set out in the last chapter), what we appear to have in Cahokia is a second-order regime in which two of our three elementary forms of domination – in this case, control over violence and charismatic politics – came together in a powerful, even explosive cocktail. This is the same combination we found in the Classic Maya elite, for whom competitive sports and warfare were similarly fused; and who extended their sovereignty by bringing large populations into their orbit through organized spectacle, or by capture, or other forms of compulsion we can only guess at.
学者们继续争论生态和社会因素在卡霍基亚的崩溃中的相对重要性,就像他们争论它是否应该被认为是一个 “复杂的酋长领地” 或 “国家”。45按照我们自己的说法(如上一章所述),我们在卡霍基亚所拥有的似乎是一个二阶政权,其中我们三种基本统治形式中的两种 —— 在这种情况下,对暴力的控制和魅力政治 —— 以一种强大的、甚至是爆炸性的鸡尾酒形式出现在一起。这与我们在古典玛雅精英中发现的组合是一样的,对他们来说,竞技体育和战争也是类似的融合;他们通过有组织的奇观,或通过捕获,或通过其他我们只能猜测的强制形式,将大量人口带入他们的轨道,从而扩大他们的主权。
Both in Cahokia and the Classic Maya, managerial activities seem to have focused on the administration of otherworldly matters, notably in the sophistication of their ritual calendars and precise orchestration of sacred space. These, however, had real-world effects, especially in the areas of city-planning, labour mobilization, public surveillance and careful monitoring of the maize cycle.46 Perhaps we are dealing here with attempts to create ‘third-order’ regimes of domination, albeit of a very different kind to modern nation states, in which control over violence and esoteric knowledge became caught up in the spiralling political competition of rival elites. This may also explain why, in both cases – Cahokia and the Maya – the collapse of such totalizing (totalitarian, even) projects, when it happened, was itself sudden, comprehensive and total.
在卡霍基亚和古典玛雅,管理活动似乎都集中在对其他世界事务的管理上,特别是在其仪式日历的复杂性和神圣空间的精确安排方面。然而,这些都有现实世界的影响,特别是在城市规划、劳动力动员、公共监督和对玉米周期的仔细监测方面。46也许我们在这里处理的是创建 “三阶” 统治制度的尝试,尽管这种制度与现代民族国家非常不同,其中对暴力和神秘知识的控制被卷入了敌对精英的螺旋式政治竞争。这也可以解释为什么在这两种情况下 —— 卡霍基亚和玛雅 —— 这种总体化(甚至是极权主义)项目的崩溃,当它发生时,本身就是突然、全面和彻底的。
Whatever the precise combination of factors at play, by about AD 1350 or 1400 the result was mass defection. Just as the metropolis of Cahokia was founded through its rulers’ ability to bring diverse populations together, often from across long distances, in the end the descendants of those people simply walked away. The Vacant Quarter implies a self-conscious rejection of everything the city of Cahokia stood for.47 How did it happen?
无论起作用的因素的确切组合是什么,到了大约公元 1350 或 1400 年,结果是大规模的叛变。正如卡霍基亚大都市是通过其统治者的能力将不同的人口聚集在一起而建立的,他们往往来自遥远的地方,最后这些人的后代只是离开了。空置区 “意味着对卡霍基亚城市所代表的一切的自觉摒弃。47它是如何发生的?
Among descendants of Cahokian subjects, migration is often framed as implying the restructuring of an entire social order, merging our three elementary freedoms into a single project of emancipation: to move away, to disobey and to build new social worlds. As we’ll see, the Osage – a Siouan people who appear originally to have inhabited the region of Fort Ancient in the Middle Ohio River valley before abandoning it for the Great Plains – used the expression ‘moving to a new country’ as a synonym for constitutional change.48 It is important to bear in mind that in this part of North America, populations were relatively sparse. There were extensive stretches of uninhabited territory (often marked by ruins and effigies, their builders long since forgotten), so it was not difficult for groups simply to relocate. What we would now call social movements often took the form of quite literal physical movements.
在 Cahokian 主体的后裔中,迁移往往被框定为意味着整个社会秩序的重组,将我们的三种基本自由合并为一个单一的解放项目:迁离、违抗和建立新的社会世界。正如我们将看到的,奥萨奇人 —— 一个似乎最初居住在俄亥俄河中游的古堡地区的西欧人,在放弃该地区前往大平原之前,使用 “迁往新的国家” 这一表述作为宪法变化的同义词。48重要的是要记住,在北美的这一地区,人口是相对稀少的。这里有大片无人居住的地区(通常以废墟和雕像为标志,其建造者早已被遗忘),因此,群体仅仅是搬迁并不困难。我们现在所称的社会运动往往采取的是相当直截了当的物理运动形式。
To get a sense of the kind of ideological conflicts that must have been going on, let’s consider the history of the Etowah river valley, part of a region then inhabited by ancestors of the Choctaw, in Georgia and Tennessee. Around the time of Cahokia’s initial take-off between AD 1000 and 1200, this area was emerging from a period of generalized warfare. Post-conflict settlement involved the creation of small towns, each with its temple-pyramids and plaza, and in every case centred on a large council house, designed as a meeting place for the entire adult community. Grave goods of the time show no indications of rank. Around 1200 the Etowah valley was for some reason abandoned; then, around half a century later, people returned to it. A burst of construction ensued, including a palace and charnel house on top of giant mounds – walled off from commoner eyes – and a royal tomb, placed directly atop the ruins of the communal council house. Burials there were accompanied by magnificent bird-man costumes and regalia apparently sent from the workshops of Cahokia itself. Smaller villages were broken up, some of their old residents moved into Etowah, and in the countryside they were replaced by the familiar pattern of scattered homesteads.49
为了了解当时的意识形态冲突,让我们考虑一下埃托瓦河谷的历史,这是当时乔克托人的祖先居住的地区的一部分,位于乔治亚州和田纳西州。在公元 1000 年和 1200 年之间卡霍基亚最初起飞的时候,这个地区正从一个普遍的战争时期走出来。冲突后的定居涉及到小城镇的建立,每个小城镇都有自己的神庙和广场,并且在每一种情况下都以一个大的议事厅为中心,作为整个成年社区的会议场所。当时的墓葬物品没有显示出等级的迹象。1200 年左右,埃托瓦河谷由于某种原因被遗弃;然后,大约半个世纪后,人们又回到了这里。随之而来的是一阵阵的建设,包括在巨大的土丘上建造宫殿和炼狱 —— 用墙隔开平民的视线 —— 以及一座皇家陵墓,直接放置在公共委员会房屋的废墟之上。在那里埋葬的人都穿着华丽的鸟人服装和礼服,显然是从卡霍基亚的工场送来的。 较小的村庄被拆散,一些老居民搬到了埃托瓦(Etowah),而在农村,它们被熟悉的分散的家庭农场模式所取代。49
Enclosed by a perimeter ditch and substantial palisade wall, the town of Etowah was at this point clearly the capital of some sort of kingdom. In 1375 someone – whether external enemies or internal rebels, we do not know – sacked Etowah and desecrated its holy places; then, after a brief and abortive attempt at reoccupation, Etowah was again entirely abandoned, as were all the towns across the region. During this period the priestly orders seem largely to vanish across much of the Southeast, to be replaced by warrior micos . Occasionally, these petty rulers would become paramount in a given region, but they lacked either the ritual authority or economic resources to create the kind of urban life that existed before. In about 1500 the Etowah valley fell under the sway of the kingdom of Coosa, by which time most of the original population appears to have left and moved on, leaving behind little more than a museum of earthworks for the Coosa to lord it over.50
Etowah 镇被一条周边的沟渠和巨大的围墙所包围,在这一点上,它显然是某种王国的首都。1375 年,有人 —— 无论是外敌还是内部叛军,我们都不知道 —— 洗劫了埃托瓦,亵渎了它的圣地;然后,在一次短暂而失败的重新占领尝试之后,埃托瓦又被完全抛弃了,整个地区的所有城镇也是如此。在这一时期,东南地区大部分地区的祭司阶层似乎都消失了,取而代之的是战士 micos。偶尔,这些小统治者会成为某个地区的最高统治者,但他们缺乏仪式上的权威或经济资源来创造以前存在的那种城市生活。大约在 1500 年,Etowah 山谷落入 Coosa 王国的控制之下,那时大部分的原始人口似乎已经离开并继续前行,留下的只是一个供 Coosa 王国统治的土楼博物馆。50
Some of those who walked away concentrated around the new capitals. In 1540, a member of Hernando De Soto’s expedition described the mico of Coosa and his core territory (a place now known, oddly enough, as Little Egypt) in the following terms:
一些走掉的人集中在新首都周围。1540 年,埃尔南多·德·索托探险队的一名成员用以下语言描述了科萨的米科和他的核心领土(一个现在很奇怪地被称为小埃及的地方):
The cacique came out to welcome him in a carrying chair borne on the shoulders of his principal men, seated on a cushion, and covered with a robe of marten skins of the form and size of a woman’s shawl. He wore a crown of feathers on his head; and around him were many Indians playing and singing. The land was very populous and had many large towns and planted fields which reached from one town to the other. It was a charming and fertile land, with good cultivated fields stretching along the rivers.51
酋长坐着他的主要手下肩上扛的椅子出来迎接他,他坐在一个垫子上,身上披着一件貂皮长袍,形状和大小与女人的披肩一样。他头上戴着一顶羽毛冠;在他周围有许多印第安人在演奏和唱歌。这片土地上人口众多,有许多大城镇和种植的田地,从一个城镇延伸到另一个城镇。这是一片迷人而肥沃的土地,有良好的耕地,沿着河流延伸。51
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, petty kingdoms of this sort appear to have been the dominant political form in much of the Southeast. Their rulers were treated with reverence and received tribute, but their rule was brittle and unstable. The Coosa mico ’ s litter, like that of his chief rival, the Lady of Cofitachequi, was carried by subordinate lords, largely because the latter couldn’t be trusted not to rise up unless kept under constant surveillance. Shortly after de Soto’s departure several of them did just that, causing the kingdom of Coosa to collapse. Meanwhile, outside the central towns much more egalitarian forms of communal life were taking form.
在 16 世纪和 17 世纪,这种小王国似乎是东南地区大部分地区的主要政治形式。他们的统治者受到尊敬并接受贡品,但他们的统治是脆弱和不稳定的。Coosa mico 的轿子和他的主要对手 Cofitachequi 夫人的轿子一样,都是由下属领主携带的,主要是因为除非受到持续监视,否则无法相信后者不会起义。 在德·索托离开后不久,他们中的一些人就这样做了,导致科萨王国崩溃。与此同时,在中心城镇之外,更加平等的社区生活形式正在形成。
By the early eighteenth century these petty kingdoms, and the very practice of building mounds and pyramids, had almost entirely vanished from the American South and Midwest. At the edge of the prairies, for example, people living in scattered homesteads began migrating seasonally, leaving the very young and old behind in the earthwork towns and taking to extended hunting and fishing in the surrounding uplands, before finally relocating entirely. In other areas, the towns would be reduced to ceremonial centres or Natchez-style hollow courts, where the mico continued to be paid magnificent tokens of respect but held almost no actual power. Then finally, when those rulers were definitively gone, people would begin descending back into the valleys, but this time in communities organized on very different principles: small towns of a few hundred people, or at most 1,000 or 2,000, with egalitarian clan structures and communal council houses.
到 18 世纪初,这些小王国以及建造土丘和金字塔的做法,几乎完全从美洲南部和中西部消失了。例如,在大草原的边缘,生活在分散的家园中的人们开始季节性迁移,把年幼的和年老的留在土城中,在周围的高地进行长时间的狩猎和捕鱼,最后才完全迁移。在其他地区,城镇将沦为仪式中心或纳奇兹式的空心法庭,在那里,米克人继续得到华丽的尊重信物,但几乎没有实际权力。最后,当这些统治者明确离开后,人们开始返回山谷,但这次是在非常不同的原则下组织的社区:几百人的小城镇,或最多 1000 或 2000 人,有平等的宗族结构和公共议会房屋。
Today historians seem inclined to see these developments as in large part a reaction to the shock of war, slavery, conquest and disease introduced by European settlers. However, they appear to have been the logical culmination of processes that had been going on for centuries before that.52
今天,历史学家似乎倾向于认为这些发展在很大程度上是对欧洲定居者带来的战争、奴隶制、征服和疾病冲击的反应。然而,它们似乎是在此之前几个世纪以来一直在进行的进程的逻辑顶点。52
By 1715, the year of the Yamasee War, the dismantling of petty kingdoms was complete across the entire region of former Mississippian influence, except for isolated hold-overs like the Natchez. Earthworks and homesteads were both things of the past, and the Southeast came to be divided among tribal republics, of the sort familiar from early ethnography.53 A number of factors made this possible. The first was demographic. As we’ve noted, North American societies were, with few exceptions, marked by low birth rates and low population densities, which in turn facilitated mobility and made it easier for agriculturalists to shift back to a mode of subsistence more oriented to hunting, fishing and foraging; or simply to relocate entirely. Meanwhile women – who in one of Scott’s ‘grain states’ would typically be viewed by the (male) authorities as little more than baby-making machines, and when not pregnant or nursing to be engaged in industrial tasks like spinning and weaving – took on stronger political roles.
到 1715 年,即 Yamasee 战争的那一年,除了像 Natchez 这样的孤立的留守者之外,在整个前密西西比人影响的地区,小王国的瓦解已经完成。土墙和家园都已成为过去,东南地区被划分为部落共和国,其类型是早期民族志中所熟悉的。53有许多因素使之成为可能。首先是人口因素。正如我们所指出的,除了少数例外,北美社会的特点是低出生率和低人口密度,这反过来又促进了流动性,使农业者更容易转回更倾向于狩猎、捕鱼和觅食的生存模式;或者干脆完全搬迁。同时,妇女 —— 在斯科特的 “谷物国” 中,她们通常被(男性)当局视为生孩子的机器,在没有怀孕或哺乳的时候,她们会从事纺纱和织布等工业工作 —— 承担了更强的政治角色。
Such details form part of the cultural background to a political struggle over the role of hereditary leadership and privileged esoteric knowledge. These battles were still being fought into relatively recent times. Consider the Nations known in the colonial period as the ‘five civilized tribes’ of the American Southeast: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole. All of them exemplify this pattern, being governed by communal councils in which all had equal say and operating by a process of consensus-finding. Yet at the same time, all shared traces of the older priests, castes and princes. In some cases hereditary leadership may have persisted into the nineteenth century, straining against the wider preference for more democratic forms of government.54
这些细节构成了关于世袭领导权和特权秘传知识的作用的政治斗争的文化背景的一部分。这些斗争直到最近还在进行。考虑到在殖民时期被称为美洲东南部 “五个文明部落” 的民族。切罗基族、奇卡索族、乔克托族、克里克族和塞米诺尔族。所有这些部落都是这种模式的典范,由社区委员会管理,所有人在其中都有平等的发言权,并通过寻求共识的过程来运作。然而,与此同时,所有的人都有老祭司、种姓和王族的痕迹。在某些情况下,世袭领导权可能一直持续到 19 世纪,与更广泛的政府民主形式的偏好相抵触。54
Some see the egalitarian institutions themselves as an outcome of self-conscious social movements, centred on the summer Green Corn ceremonies.55 In art their symbol was the looped square; architecturally this symbolic template was realized in the creation not just of council or town houses, but also square grounds for public meetings, a feature with no precedent in the old Mississippian towns and cities. Among the Cherokee we find evidence of priests claiming to be sent from the heavens with special knowledge to impart. Yet we also find stories, such as that of the Aní-Kutánî, about the existence long ago of a theocratic society governed by a hereditary caste of male priests and how they so systematically abused their power, particularly in their abuse of women, that the people rose up and massacred the lot of them.56
一些人认为,平等主义机构本身是以夏季绿玉米仪式为中心的自觉社会运动的结果。55在艺术上,他们的象征是环形广场;在建筑上,这种象征性的模板不仅体现在议会或城镇房屋的创建上,还体现在公共会议的方形场地上,这一特点在密西西比的古老城镇中是没有先例的。在切罗基人中,我们发现有证据表明,祭司声称是上天派来的,有特殊的知识要传授。然而,我们也发现了一些故事,如 Aní-Kutánî 的故事,说的是很久以前存在一个由男性祭司世袭种姓统治的神权社会,他们如何系统地滥用权力,特别是虐待妇女,以至于人民起来屠杀了他们。56
Much like the arguments Iroquoian speakers presented to Jesuit missionaries, or for that matter their theories about dreams, descriptions of daily life in these post-Mississippian townships often feel strikingly familiar – perhaps disturbingly so for anyone committed to the idea that the Age of Enlightenment was the result of a ‘civilizing process’ originating exclusively in Europe. Among the Creek, for instance, the post of mico was reduced to a facilitator of the assembly and supervisor of collective granaries. Each day the adult men of a town would gather to spend much of the day arguing about politics, in a spirit of rational debate, in conversations punctuated by the smoking of tobacco and drinking of caffeinated beverages.57 Both tobacco and the ‘black drink’ had originally been drugs ingested by shamans or other spiritual virtuosos in intense and highly concentrated doses so as to produce altered states of consciousness; now, instead, they were doled out in carefully measured portions to everyone assembled. What Jesuits reported in the Northeast seems to apply here too: ‘They believe that there is nothing so suitable as Tobacco to appease the passions; that is why they never attend a council without a pipe or calumet in their mouths. The smoke, they say, gives them intelligence, and enables them to see clearly through the most intricate matters.’58
很像伊罗克人向耶稣会传教士提出的论点,或者说,他们关于梦的理论,对这些后密西西比时代的乡镇日常生活的描述常常让人感到非常熟悉 —— 对于任何致力于启蒙时代是完全源自欧洲的 “文明进程” 的观点的人来说,也许是令人不安的。例如,在克里克人中,米克的职位被简化为集会的促进者和集体粮仓的监督者。每天,镇上的成年男子会聚集在一起,本着理性辩论的精神,花上一天的大部分时间来讨论政治,在谈话中,他们会抽着烟草,喝着含有咖啡因的饮料。57烟草和 “黑饮料” 最初都是萨满或其他精神大师摄入的药物,其剂量密集且高度集中,以产生改变意识的状态;而现在,它们被小心翼翼地分发给每一个聚集的人。耶稣会士在东北地区的报告似乎也适用于此:“他们认为没有什么比烟草更适合于平息激情;这就是为什么他们在参加会议时嘴里不含烟斗或卡鲁梅特的原因。他们说,这种烟给他们带来了智慧,使他们能够清楚地看到最复杂的事情。58
Now, if all this sounds suspiciously reminiscent of an Enlightenment coffee-house it isn’t a total coincidence. Tobacco, for example, was adopted around this period by settlers then taken back and popularized in Europe itself, and it was indeed promoted in Europe as a drug to be taken in small doses to focus the mind. Obviously, there is no direct cultural translation here. There never is. But as we have seen, indigenous North American ideas – from the advocacy of individual liberties to scepticism of revealed religion – certainly had an impact on the European Enlightenment, even though, like pipe-smoking, such ideas underwent many transformations in the process.59 No doubt it would be too much to suggest that the Enlightenment itself had its first stirrings in seventeenth-century North America. But it’s possible, perhaps, to imagine some future non-Eurocentric history where such a suggestion would not be treated as almost by definition outrageous and absurd.
现在,如果这一切听起来让人怀疑是启蒙运动时期的咖啡馆,那并不是完全的巧合。例如,烟草在这一时期被定居者采用,然后被带回欧洲并在欧洲本身得到推广,而且它确实在欧洲被作为一种药物来推广,小剂量服用可以集中精神。很明显,这里没有直接的文化翻译。从来没有。但正如我们所看到的,北美的本土思想 —— 从倡导个人自由到怀疑启示宗教 —— 肯定对欧洲的启蒙运动产生了影响,尽管像吸食烟斗一样,这些思想在这个过程中经历了许多转变。59毫无疑问,如果说启蒙运动本身是在十七世纪的北美首次兴起,那就太过分了。但是,也许可以想象,在未来一些非欧洲中心主义的历史中,这样的建议不会被视为几乎是离谱和荒谬的。
Clearly, evolutionist categories only confuse the issue here. Arguing about whether Hopewellians were ‘bands’, ‘tribes’ or ‘chiefdoms’, or indeed whether Cahokia was a ‘complex chiefdom’ or a ‘state’, tells us virtually nothing. Insofar as we can speak of ‘states’ and ‘chiefdoms’ at all, in the case of Native North America the state-making project seems to come first, virtually out of nowhere, and the chiefdoms observed by de Soto and his successors appear to be little more than the rubble left behind by its downfall.
很明显,进化论者的分类在这里只是混淆了问题。争论霍普韦利人是 “族群”、“部落” 还是 “酋长领地”,或者争论卡霍基亚是 “复杂的酋长领地” 还是 “国家”,实际上什么也没有告诉我们。只要我们还能谈论 “国家” 和 “酋长领地”,在北美原住民的情况下,建立国家的计划似乎首先出现,几乎是凭空出现的,而德索托和他的继任者观察到的酋长领地似乎只不过是其衰落后留下的废墟。
There must be more interesting and useful questions to ask of the past, and the categories we’ve been developing in this book suggest what some of these might be. As we’ve seen, an important feature in much of the Americas is the relationship between esoteric and bureaucratic knowledge. On the surface, the two might not have much to do with one another. It is easy enough to see how brute force can take institutional form in sovereignty, or as the assertion of charisma in a competitive political field. The path from knowledge, as a general form of domination, to administrative power might seem more circuitous. Does the kind of esoteric knowledge we encounter at Chavín, often founded in hallucinogenic experience, really have anything in common with the accounting methods of the later Inca? It seems highly unlikely – until, that is, we recall that even in much more recent times, qualifications to enter bureaucracies are typically based on some form of knowledge that has virtually nothing to do with actual administration. It’s only important because it’s obscure. Hence in tenth-century China or eighteenth-century Germany, aspiring civil servants had to pass exams on proficiency in literary classics, written in archaic or even dead languages, just as today they will have had to pass exams on rational choice theory or the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. The arts of administration are really only learned later on and through more traditional means: by practice, apprenticeship or informal mentoring.
对过去一定有更多有趣和有用的问题要问,而我们在本书中一直在发展的类别表明其中一些问题可能是什么。正如我们所看到的,美洲大部分地区的一个重要特征是神秘知识和官僚知识之间的关系。从表面上看,这两者之间可能没有什么关系。我们很容易看到蛮力如何在主权中以制度的形式出现,或者在竞争性的政治领域中作为魅力的宣扬。从知识,作为统治的一般形式,到行政权力的路径似乎更加曲折。我们在 Chavín 遇到的那种深奥的知识,往往建立在致幻的经验之上,是否真的与后来印加人的会计方法有任何共同之处?这似乎不太可能 —— 直到我们想起,即使在更近的时代,进入官僚机构的资格通常是基于某种形式的知识,而这些知识与实际管理几乎毫无关系。它之所以重要,只是因为它晦涩难懂。因此,在十世纪的中国或十八世纪的德国,有抱负的公务员必须通过用古老甚至死亡语言书写的文学经典的考试,就像今天他们必须通过理性选择理论或雅克·德里达的哲学考试一样。行政管理的艺术实际上只能在后来通过更传统的方式学习:通过实践、学徒或非正式的指导。
Similarly, those who designed the great construction projects of Poverty Point or Hopewell were clearly drawing on esoteric knowledge of some sort – astronomical, mythic, numerological – which was contiguous with the practical knowledge of maths, engineering and construction, not to mention techniques of organizing and monitoring human labour (even voluntary labour) which were required to realize those designs. Over the long term of pre-Columbian history, this particular sort of knowledge always seems to lie at the core of systems of domination that periodically emerged. Hopewell is a perfect example, since the heroic games that accompanied ceremonial projects were not really the basis for systematic domination at all.60 Cahokia, on the other hand, appears to represent a self-conscious effort to turn that style of administrative esoterica into a basis for sovereignty; the gradual transformation of geometric earthworks, designed on cosmic principles, into actual fortifications being only the most obvious indication. In the end it didn’t work. Political power retreated back into heroic theatre, if in a decidedly more violent form.
同样,那些设计贫困点或霍普韦尔的伟大建筑项目的人,显然是利用了某种神秘的知识 —— 天文、神话、数字 —— 这些知识与数学、工程和建筑的实用知识相毗连,更不用说实现这些设计所需的组织和监督人类劳动(甚至是自愿劳动)的技术。在哥伦布之前的历史长河中,这种特殊的知识似乎总是处于周期性出现的统治体系的核心位置。霍普韦尔就是一个完美的例子,因为伴随着仪式项目的英雄游戏根本就不是系统统治的真正基础。60另一方面,卡霍基亚似乎代表了一种自觉的努力,即把这种行政神秘主义的风格变成主权的基础;根据宇宙原则设计的几何土方工程逐渐转变为实际的防御工事,只是最明显的迹象。最后,它没有发挥作用。政治权力退回到了英雄剧中,如果以一种明显的更暴力的形式。
Even more strikingly, however, the very principle of esoteric knowledge came increasingly to be challenged.
然而,更引人注目的是,深奥知识的原则越来越受到挑战。
What we saw in Hopewell was a kind of ‘reformation’, in the same sense that the European Reformation of the sixteenth century involved a fundamental reorientation of access to the sacred – albeit one which had knock-on effects in just about every other aspect of social life, from the organization of work to the nature of politics. In Europe these battles played out over the medium of scripture: the translation of the Bible from obscure ancient languages into regional vernaculars, and its release from the closed sanctuary of the High Faith into mass dissemination via the printing press. In the pre-Columbian Americas, the equivalent media revolution focused instead on the (quite literal) reformation of mathematical principles underlying the creation of complex geometrical earthworks which captured the sacred in spatial form.
我们在霍普韦尔看到的是一种 “改革”,就像十六世纪的欧洲宗教改革涉及到对神圣事物的根本性调整一样 —— 尽管这种调整对社会生活的几乎所有其他方面都产生了连锁反应,从工作的组织到政治的性质。在欧洲,这些斗争是围绕着经文这一媒介展开的:将《圣经》从晦涩的古代语言翻译成地区性的白话文,并通过印刷术将其从神圣信仰的封闭圣殿中释放出来,进行大规模传播。在哥伦布之前的美洲,相应的媒体革命反而集中在数学原理的改革上,这些数学原理是创造复杂的几何形体的基础,以空间形式捕捉神圣的东西。
In both cases, such reformations determined who could and could not partake of a sacred power encapsulated in stories and myths, encoded on the one hand as complex layers of scripture (the Old and New Testaments and other holy books), and on the other as a network of landscape monuments, just as complex in their own way. Indeed, there is every reason to think that the images of chthonic and other beings frozen in ancient earthworks were testaments of a sort. They were mnemonic schemes that prompted the recollection and re-enactment of exploits carried out by founding ancestors at the beginning of days and magnified in monumental form, to be witnessed by the powers dwelling ‘on high’. While European clergy burned incense to form a sentient bond with the invisible (a distant echo of biblical animal sacrifice), Hopewell peoples lit tobacco in their effigy pipes, sending smoke up towards the heavens.
在这两种情况下,这种改革决定了谁可以和谁不可以分享一种囊括在故事和神话中的神圣力量,这种力量一方面被编码为复杂的经文(《新旧约圣经》和其他圣书),另一方面则是由景观纪念物组成的网络,以它们自己的方式同样复杂。事实上,我们完全有理由认为,冻结在古代土楼中的 chthonic 和其他生命的图像是某种形式的证词。它们是一种记忆方案,促使人们回忆和重演建国初期的祖先所进行的探索,并以纪念碑的形式加以放大,让居住在 “高处” 的力量见证。当欧洲神职人员焚烧香火以形成与无形之物的情感纽带时(与圣经中的动物祭祀遥相呼应),霍普韦尔人在他们的雕像烟斗中点燃烟草,将烟雾送上天际。
Here we begin to comprehend what it might have meant actually to stop creating such monuments entirely, or to repurpose drugs like tobacco towards collective, rational debate. Of course, this does not necessarily imply a systematic, Enlightenment-style rejection of esoteric knowledge. It could also mean the democratization of such knowledge – or at least the transformation of what had once been a theocratic elite into a kind of oligarchy. We find an excellent example of this in the history of the Osage.
在这里,我们开始理解完全停止创造这种纪念碑,或者将烟草等药物重新用于集体的、理性的辩论,实际上可能意味着什么。当然,这并不一定意味着系统地、启蒙式地拒绝深奥的知识。它也可能意味着这种知识的民主化 —— 或者至少意味着曾经的神权精英转变为一种寡头政治。我们在奥萨奇人的历史中找到了这方面的一个很好的例子。
A nation of the Great Plains, the Osage are directly descended from Mississippianized Fort Ancient people, and much of their ritual and mythology can be traced back directly to their Midwestern origins.61 The Osage were doubly fortunate. First, because they succeeded in taking advantage of a strategic position on the Missouri River to ally with the French government and thereby maintain their independence, even creating something of a trading empire from 1678 to 1803. Second, because the ethnographer who documented their ancient traditions in the first decades of the twentieth century, Francis La Flesche, was himself a native speaker of Omaha (a closely related language), and therefore appears to have been unusually capable and receptive. As a result we have a much better sense of how Osage elders thought about their own traditions than is the case for most other Plains societies.
作为大平原的一个民族,奥萨奇人是密西西比化的古堡人的直接后裔,他们的许多仪式和神话可以直接追溯到中西部的起源。61奥萨奇人是双重幸运的。首先,因为他们成功地利用了密苏里河的战略地位,与法国政府结盟,从而保持了他们的独立性,甚至在 1678 年至 1803 年期间创造了一些贸易帝国。第二,因为在二十世纪头几十年里记录他们古老传统的民族学家弗朗西斯·拉弗莱什本人就是奥马哈语(一种密切相关的语言)的母语者,因此,他似乎有异乎寻常的能力和接受力。因此,与其他大多数平原社会相比,我们对奥萨奇老人如何看待自己的传统有了更好的认识。
Let us begin with a map of a typical Osage summer village. Osage communities typically moved between three seasonal locations: permanent villages of multi-family lodge houses made up of perhaps 2,000 people; summer camps; and camps for the annual midwinter bison hunts. The basic village pattern was a circle divided into two exogamous moieties, sky and earth, with twenty-four clans in all, each of which had to be represented in any settlement or camp, just as at least one representative of each had to be present for any major ritual. The system was initially based on a tripartite division: seven clans each designated Sky People, Earth People and Water People, with the last two grouped together as the earth moiety in relation to sky, making twenty-one; then over time this was expanded when clans were added to become 7+2 (sky, Tsizhu) against 7+7+1 (earth, Honga), giving twenty-four in total.
让我们从一张典型的奥萨奇夏季村庄的地图开始。奥萨奇社区通常在三个季节性地点之间移动:由多家庭小屋组成的永久性村庄,大约有 2000 人;夏令营;以及每年仲冬狩猎野牛的营地。村庄的基本模式是一个圆圈,分为两个,即天空和大地,总共有 24 个部族,每个部族都必须在任何定居点或营地有代表,就像每个部族至少有一个代表参加任何重大仪式一样。这个系统最初是以三方划分为基础的:七个部族分别被指定为天人、地人和水人,最后两个部族被归为与天有关的地人,共 21 个部族;然后随着时间的推移,这些部族被扩大为 7+2(天, Tsizhu,子珠)和 7+7+1(地,Honga,洪加),共 24 个。
At this point you may well be wondering how, precisely, did it ever come about that people arranged themselves in such intricate patterns? Who exactly decided that each of the twenty-four clans would be represented in every village, and how did they orchestrate things so it would happen? In the case of the Osage we actually have something of an answer, since Osage history was remembered essentially as a series of constitutional crises in which the elders of the community gradually worked out exactly this arrangement.
在这一点上,你可能会想,确切地说,人们是如何以如此复杂的模式来安排自己的?究竟是谁决定 24 个部族中的每一个部族,他们又是如何安排的呢?在奥萨奇人的案例中,我们实际上已经有了一些答案,因为奥萨奇人的历史在人们的记忆中基本上是一系列的宪法危机,在这些危机中,社区的长老们逐渐制定了确切的安排。
The history, according to La Flesche, is difficult to piece together because it is distributed among the clans. Or, to be more exact, a bare-bones version of the story, full of cryptic allusions, is known to everyone; but each clan also has its own history and stock of secret knowledge, whereby the true meaning of certain aspects of the story is revealed over the course of seven levels of initiation. The real story then can be said to be broken into 168 pieces – arguably 336, since each revelation contained two parts: a political history and an accompanying philosophical reflection on what that history reveals about the forces responsible for dynamic aspects of the visible world that caused the stars to move, plants to grow, and so forth.
据拉弗莱什说,这段历史很难拼凑,因为它分布在各个部族之间。或者,更确切地说,每个人都知道这个故事的一个赤裸裸的版本,其中充满了神秘的典故;但每个部族也有自己的历史和秘密知识储备,据此,故事的某些方面的真正含义会在七个级别的启蒙教育过程中得到揭示。那么,真正的故事可以说被分成了 168 块 —— 可以说是 336 块,因为每一个启示都包含两部分:一个政治历史和一个伴随的哲学思考,即该历史所揭示的关于负责可见世界动态方面的力量,导致星星移动,植物生长,等等。
Records, La Flesche observed, had also been kept of particular discussions in which various results of this study of nature were debated and discussed. Osage concluded that this force was ultimately unknowable and gave it the name Wakonda, which could alternately be translated as ‘God’ or ‘Mystery’.62 Through lengthy investigation, La Flesche notes, elders determined that life and motion was produced by the interaction of two principles – sky and earth – and therefore they divided their own society in the same way, arranging it so that men from one division could only take wives from the other. A village was a model of the universe, and as such a form of ‘supplication’ to its animating power.63
拉弗莱什观察到,还保留了一些特殊的讨论记录,在这些讨论中,对这种自然研究的各种结果进行了辩论和讨论。奥萨奇的结论是,这种力量最终是不可知的,并给它取名为 Wakonda,可译为 “上帝” 或 “神秘的”。62La Flesche 指出,通过长时间的调查,长老们确定生命和运动是由两个原则 —— 天空和大地 —— 的相互作用产生的,因此他们以同样的方式划分自己的社会,安排好一个部门的男人只能娶另一个部门的妻子。一个村庄是宇宙的模型,因此也是对宇宙动力的一种 “祈求” 形式。63
Initiation through the levels of understanding required a substantial investment of time and wealth, and most Osage only attained the first or second tier. Those who reached the top were known collectively as the Nohozhinga or ‘Little Old Men’ (though some were women),64 and were also the ultimate political authorities. While every Osage was expected to spend an hour after sunrise in prayerful reflection, the Little-Old-Men carried out daily deliberations on questions of natural philosophy and their specific relevance to political issues of the day. They also kept a history of the most important discussions.65 La Flesche explains that, periodically, particularly perplexing questions would come up: either about the nature of the visible universe, or about the application of these understandings to human affairs. At this point it was customary for two elders to retreat to a secluded spot in the wilderness and carry out a vigil for four to seven days, to ‘search their minds’, before returning with a report on their conclusions.
通过各级理解的启动需要投入大量的时间和财富,大多数奥萨奇人只达到了第一或第二级的水平。那些达到顶层的人被统称为 Nohozhinga 或 “小老头”(尽管有些是女性)。64他们也是最终的政治权威。虽然每个奥萨奇人都要在日出后花一个小时进行祈祷反省,但小老头们每天都要对自然哲学问题及其与当时政治问题的具体关系进行讨论。他们还记录了最重要的讨论历史。65 La Flesche 解释说,定期会出现一些特别令人困惑的问题:要么是关于可见宇宙的性质,要么是关于这些理解在人类事务中的应用。在这个时候,两个长老通常会撤退到荒野中的一个僻静处,进行四到七天的守夜,以 “搜索他们的思想”,然后带着他们的结论报告回来。
The Nohozhinga were the body that met daily to discuss affairs of state.66 While larger assemblies could be called to ratify decisions, they were the effective government. In this sense one could say that the Osage were a theocracy, though it would be more accurate, perhaps, to say there was no difference between officials, priests and philosophers. All were title-bearing officials, including the ‘soldiers’ assigned to help chiefs enforce their decisions, while ‘Protectors of the Land’ assigned to hunt down and kill outsiders who poached game were also religious figures. As for the history: it begins in mythic terms, as an ‘allegorical fable’, then rapidly turns into a story about institutional reform.
Nohozhinga 是每天开会讨论国家事务的机构。66虽然可以召集更大的会议来批准决定,但他们是有效的政府。在这个意义上,人们可以说奥萨奇人是一个神权政体,尽管更准确的说法是官员、牧师和哲学家之间没有区别。所有人都是有头衔的官员,包括被指派帮助酋长执行其决定的 “士兵”,而被指派追捕和杀死偷猎的外来者的 “土地保护者” 也是宗教人物。至于历史:它以神话的形式开始,作为一个 “寓言式的寓言”,然后迅速转变成一个关于制度改革的故事。
In the beginning, the three main divisions – Sky People, Earth People and Water People – descended into the world and set out in search of its indigenous inhabitants. When they located these inhabitants, they were discovered to be in a repulsive state: living amid filth, bones and carrion, feeding on offal, rotting flesh, even each other. Despite this more-than-Hobbesian situation, the Isolated Earth People (as they came to be known) were also powerful sorcerers, capable of using the four winds to destroy life everywhere. Only the chief of the Water division had the courage to enter their village, negotiate with their leader and convince his people to abandon their murderous and unsanitary ways. In the end, he persuaded the Isolated Earth People to join them in a federation – to ‘move to a new country’, free from the pollution of decaying corpses. This is how the circular village plan was first conceived, with the one-time wizards placed opposite Water, at the eastern door, where they were in charge of the House of Mystery, used for all peaceful rituals, and where all children were brought to be named. The Bear clan of the Earth division was put in charge of an opposite House of Mystery, responsible for rituals concerning war. The problem was that the Isolated Earth People, while no longer murderous, did not prove particularly effective allies either. Before long everything had descended into continual strife and feuding, until the Water division demanded another ‘move to a new country’, which initiated, among other things, an elaborate process of constitutional reform, making declarations of war impossible without the acquiescence of every clan. This too proved problematic over time, since it meant that if an external enemy entered the country, at least a week was required to organize a military response. Eventually it became necessary yet again to ‘move to another country’, which this time involved the creation of a new, decentralized clan-by-clan system of military authority. This in turn led to a new crisis and round of reforms: in this case, the separation of civil and military affairs with the creation of a hereditary peace chief for each division, their houses placed on the east and west extremes of the village, and various subordinate officials, as well as a parallel structure with responsibility for all five major Osage villages.
起初,三个主要部门 —— 天人、地人和水人 —— 来到这个世界,开始寻找世界上的原住居民。当他们找到这些居民时,发现他们处于令人厌恶的状态:生活在污秽、骨头和腐肉中,以内脏、腐肉,甚至彼此为食。尽管这种情况比霍布斯的情况更糟糕,但孤立的地球人(他们后来被称为)也是强大的巫师,能够利用四种风来摧毁各地的生命。只有水师的首领有勇气进入他们的村庄,与他们的首领谈判,并说服他的人民放弃他们凶残和不卫生的方式。最后,他说服孤立的地球人加入他们的联盟 —— “搬到一个新的国家”,不受腐烂的尸体的污染。这就是环形村落计划的最初构想,曾经的巫师被安排在水的对面,在东门,他们负责神秘之家,用于所有的和平仪式,所有的孩子都被带到这里来命名。大地部的熊氏族人被安排在对面的神秘之屋,负责有关战争的仪式。问题是,孤立的地球人虽然不再杀人,但也没有被证明是特别有效的盟友。不久之后,一切都,陷入了持续的纷争和争斗,直到水师要求再次 “迁往新的国家”,这就启动了一个精心设计的宪法改革进程,使宣战在没有每个部族的默许下成为可能。随着时间的推移,这也被证明是有问题的,因为这意味着如果有外部敌人进入该国,至少需要一周的时间来组织军事反应。最终,有必要再次 “迁往另一个国家”,这一次需要建立一个新的、分散的、逐个部族的军事权力体系。这反过来又导致了新的危机和新一轮的改革:在这种情况下,民政和军事事务分离,为每个部门建立一个世袭的和平首领,他们的房子放在村庄的东西两端,还有各种下属官员,以及一个负责所有五个主要奥萨奇村庄的平行结构。
We will not linger over the details. But two elements of the story deserve emphasis. The first is that the narrative sets off from the neutralization of arbitrary power: the taming of the Isolated Earth People’s leader – the chief sorcerer, who abuses his deadly knowledge – by according him some central position in a new system of alliances. This is a common story among the descendants of groups that had formerly come under the influence of Mississippian civilization. In the process of co-opting their leader, the destructive ritual knowledge once held by the Isolated Earth People was, eventually, distributed to everyone, along with elaborate checks and balances concerning its use. The second is that even the Osage, who ascribed key roles to sacred knowledge in their political affairs, in no sense saw their social structure as something given from on high but rather as a series of legal and intellectual discoveries – even breakthroughs.
我们将不在细节上多做停留。但这个故事的两个要素值得强调。首先,故事从专制权力的中和出发:驯服孤立地球人的领袖 —— 滥用致命知识的首席巫师 —— 给他在新的联盟体系中提供一些中心位置。这是以前受密西西比文明影响的群体的后裔中的一个常见故事。在与他们的领袖合作的过程中,曾经由 “与世隔绝的地球人” 掌握的破坏性仪式知识最终被分配给了所有人,同时还有关于其使用的详细检查和平衡。其次,即使是在政治事务中赋予神圣知识以关键作用的奥萨奇人,在任何意义上都不认为他们的社会结构是来自高层的东西,而是一系列的法律和知识发现 —— 甚至是突破。
This last point is critical, because – as outlined earlier – we are used to imagining that the very notion of a people self-consciously creating their own institutional arrangements is largely a product of the Enlightenment. Obviously, the idea that nations could be effectively created by great lawmakers such as Solon of Athens, Lycurgus in Sparta or Zoroaster in Persia, and that their national character was in some sense a product of that institutional structure, was a familiar one in antiquity. But we are generally taught to think of the French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu as the first to build an explicit and systematic body of theory based on the principle of institutional reform with his book The Spirit of the Laws (1748). By doing so, it’s widely believed, he effectively created modern politics. The Founding Fathers of the United States, all avid readers of Montesquieu, were consciously trying to put his theories into practice when they attempted to create a constitution that would preserve the spirit of individual liberty, and spoke of the results as a ‘government of laws and not of men’.
这最后一点很关键,因为 —— 如前所述 —— 我们习惯于想象,一个民族自觉地创造自己的制度安排这一概念在很大程度上是启蒙运动的产物。显然,国家可以由雅典的索伦、斯巴达的利库古斯或波斯的琐罗亚斯德等伟大的立法者有效地创造出来,而他们的民族特性在某种意义上是这种制度结构的产物,这种想法在古代是很熟悉的。但是,我们通常被教导认为,法国政治哲学家查尔斯·路易·德·秒塔,孟德斯鸠男爵是,他以《法律的精神》(1748 年)一书为基础,建立了一套明确而系统的制度改革原则的理论体系。人们普遍认为,通过这样做,他有效地创造了现代政治。美洲的开国元勋们都是孟德斯鸠的狂热读者,当他们试图制定一部能够维护个人自由精神的宪法时,他们有意识地试图将孟德斯鸠的理论付诸实践,并将其结果说成是 “法律而非人的政府”。
As it turns out, precisely this sort of thinking was commonplace in North America well before European settlers appeared on the scene. It might not be a coincidence, in fact, that in 1725 a French explorer named Bourgmont brought an Osage and Missouria delegation across the Atlantic to Paris, around the time Lahontan’s works were at the height of their popularity. It was traditional at the time to organize a series of public events around such ‘savage’ diplomats and arrange private meetings with prominent European intellectuals. We don’t know whom specifically they met with, but Montesquieu was indeed in Paris at the time, and already working on such subjects. As one historian of the Osage notes, it is hard to imagine Montesquieu would not have attended. At any rate, the chapters in The Spirit of the Laws which speculate on the modes of savage government seem an almost exact reproduction of what Montesquieu would likely have heard from them, albeit framed by an artificial distinction between those who do or don’t cultivate the land.67
事实证明,在欧洲定居者出现之前,这种想法在北美已经很普遍了。事实上,1725 年,一位名叫 Bourgmont 的法国探险家带着一个奥萨奇和密苏里亚代表团穿越大西洋来到巴黎,这可能不是巧合,因为当时拉洪丹的作品正处于最受欢迎的阶段。当时的传统做法是,围绕这种 “野蛮人” 外交官组织一系列公共活动,并安排与欧洲著名知识分子的私人会面。我们不知道他们具体会见了谁,但孟德斯鸠当时确实在巴黎,而且已经在研究此类主题。正如一位奥赛格人的历史学家所指出的,很难想象孟德斯鸠会不参加。无论如何,《法律的精神》中推测野蛮人政府模式的章节似乎几乎完全再现了孟德斯鸠可能从他们那里听到的内容,尽管是以人为的区分那些耕种或不耕种土地的人为框架。67
The connections may well run deeper than we think.
这种联系很可能比我们想象的更深。
We have come full circle. The case of North America not only throws conventional evolutionary schemes into chaos; it also clearly demonstrates that it’s simply not true to say that if one falls into the trap of ‘state formation’ there’s no getting out. Whatever happened in Cahokia, the backlash against it was so severe that it set forth repercussions we are still feeling today.
我们已经绕了一圈。北美的情况不仅使传统的进化计划陷入混乱;它还清楚地表明,如果一个人落入 “国家形成” 的陷阱就无法脱身的说法是不正确的。无论在 Cahokia 发生了什么,对它的反击是如此严重,以至于我们今天仍能感受到它的反响。
What we are suggesting is that indigenous doctrines of individual liberty, mutual aid and political equality, which made such an impression on French Enlightenment thinkers, were neither (as many of them supposed) the way all humans can be expected to behave in a State of Nature. Nor were they (as many anthropologists now assume) simply the way the cultural cookie happened to crumble in that particular part of the world. This is not to say there is no truth whatsoever in either of these positions. As we’ve said before, there are certain freedoms – to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties – that tend to be taken for granted by anyone who has not been specifically trained into obedience (as anyone reading this book, for instance, is likely to have been). Still, the societies that European settlers encountered, and the ideals expressed by thinkers like Kandiaronk, only really make sense as the product of a specific political history: a history in which questions of hereditary power, revealed religion, personal freedom and the independence of women were still very much matters of self-conscious debate, and in which the overall direction, for the last three centuries at least, had been explicitly anti-authoritarian.
我们所建议的是,给法国启蒙思想家留下深刻印象的个人自由、互助和政治平等的本土学说,既不是(像他们中的许多人所认为的那样)可以期望所有人类在自然状态下的行为方式。它们也不是(像许多人类学家现在所认为的那样)仅仅是世界上那个特定地区的文化饼干碰巧破碎的方式。这并不是说这两种立场中没有任何真理。正如我们以前说过的,有一些自由 —— 移动、不服从、重新安排社会关系 —— 往往被任何没有被特别训练成服从的人视为理所当然(例如,阅读本书的人很可能就是这样)。尽管如此,欧洲定居者遇到的社会,以及像坎迪阿伦克这样的思想家所表达的理想,只有作为特定政治历史的产物才真正有意义:在这段历史中,世袭权力、启示宗教、个人自由和妇女独立等问题仍然是非常自觉的辩论事项,而且至少在过去三个世纪里,总体方向是明确的反权威主义。
East St Louis is, of course, a long way from Montreal, and no one to our knowledge has ever suggested that Iroquoian-speaking peoples of the Great Lakes region were ever, themselves, directly under Mississippian rule. So it would be going a bit too far to suggest that the views recorded by men like Lahontan were, in any literal sense, the ideology that overthrew Mississippian civilization. Still, a careful review of oral traditions, historical accounts and the ethnographic record shows that those who framed what we call the ‘indigenous critique’ of European civilization were not only keenly aware of alternative political possibilities, but for the most part saw their own social orders as self-conscious creations, designed as a barrier against all that Cahokia might have represented – or indeed, all those qualities they were later to find so objectionable in the French.
当然,东圣路易斯离蒙特利尔很远,而且据我们所知,从来没有人认为大湖区讲伊鲁古语的民族本身曾经直接受到米西西比人的统治。因此,如果说像 Lahontan 这样的人所记录的观点在任何字面意义上都是推翻密西西比文明的意识形态,那就有点过分了。然而,对口述传统、历史记载和人种学记录的仔细审查表明,那些对欧洲文明进行所谓的 “本土批判” 的人不仅敏锐地意识到了其他的政治可能性,而且在大多数情况下,他们认为自己的社会秩序是自觉的创造,旨在阻止卡霍基亚可能代表的一切 —— 或者实际上,他们后来发现法国人的所有品质是如此令人讨厌。
Let us start with the available oral traditions. These are unfortunately somewhat limited. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Iroquoia was divided between a number of shifting political coalitions and confederacies of which the most prominent were the Wendat (Huron), based in what’s now Quebec; the Five Nations or Haudenosaunee (often referred to as ‘League Iroquois’), distributed across what’s now upstate New York; and an Ontario-based confederation that the French referred to as the ‘Neutrals’. The Wendat referred to this last as Attiwandaronk – which literally means ‘those whose speech is not quite right’. We don’t actually know what these Neutrals called themselves (clearly it wasn’t that); but according to early accounts, they were by far the most numerous and powerful, at least until their society was devastated by famine and disease in the 1630s and 1640s. Afterwards the survivors were absorbed by the Seneca, given names and thus incorporated in one or other Seneca clan.
让我们从现有的口头传统开始。遗憾的是,这些都是有限的。在十六世纪末和十七世纪初,Iroquoia 分成了一些不断变化的政治联盟和同盟,其中最突出的是 Wendat(休伦族),基地在现在的魁北克;五族或 Haudenosaunee(常被称为 ‘联盟易洛魁人’),分布在现在的纽约州北部;还有一个安大略省的联盟,法国人称其为 ‘中立者’。温达特人将这最后一个联盟称为阿提旺达隆克 —— 字面意思是 “那些说话不大对劲的人”。我们实际上不知道这些中立者如何称呼自己(显然不是这样);但根据早期的描述,他们是迄今为止人数最多和最强大的,至少在 1630 年代和 1640 年代他们的社会被饥荒和疾病摧毁之前是如此。之后,幸存者被塞内卡人吸收,被赋予名字,从而被纳入一个或其他塞内卡氏族。
A similar fate befell the Wendat Confederation, whose power had been decisively broken in the year Kandiaronk was born, 1649, when they were scattered or absorbed during the notorious ‘Beaver Wars’. In Kandiaronk’s own lifetime the remaining Wendat were leading a fairly precarious existence: partly driven north towards Quebec; partly under the protection of a French fort in a place called Michilimackinac, near Lake Michigan. Kandiaronk himself spent much of his life trying to put the confederation’s pieces back together and, according to oral histories at least, attempting to found a coalition that would unite the warring nations against the invaders. In this he failed. As a result, we don’t actually know the stories told by members of any of these other great confederacies about the origins of their political institutions. By the time oral histories began to be written down in the nineteenth century, only the Haudenosaunee remained.
类似的命运也降临在温达特人联盟身上,他们的势力在坎迪阿伦克出生的那一年,即 1649 年,就被决定性地打破了,在臭名昭著的 “海狸战争” 中,他们被分散或被吸收。在坎迪阿伦克生前,剩余的温达特人正过着相当不稳定的生活:一部分被赶往魁北克;一部分在密歇根湖附近一个叫 Michilimackinac 的地方受到法国堡垒的保护。坎迪阿伦克本人一生中大部分时间都在努力将联邦的碎片重新组合起来,而且,至少根据口述历史,他试图建立一个联盟,将交战民族团结起来,共同对抗侵略者。在这一点上,他失败了。因此,我们实际上并不了解这些其他伟大联盟的成员所讲述的关于其政治机构起源的故事。当口述历史在 19 世纪开始被写下来的时候,只剩下了豪德诺萨尼人。
We do, however, have numerous versions of the foundation of the League of Five Nations (the Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Mohawk), an epic known as the Gayanashagowa . What is most remarkable about this epic, in the present context at least, is the degree to which it represents political institutions as self-conscious human creations. Certainly, the story contains magical elements. In a certain sense, the main characters – Deganawideh the Peacemaker, Jigonsaseh the Mother of Nations and so forth – are reincarnations of characters from the creation myth. But what comes through most strongly in the text is its representation of a social problem with a social solution: a breakdown of relationships in which the country is plunged into chaos and revenge, spiralling to a point where social order has dissolved away and where the powerful have become literal cannibals. Most powerful of all is Adodarhoh (Tadodaho), who is represented as a witch, deformed, monstrous and capable of commanding others to do his bidding.
然而,我们确实有许多关于五族联盟(塞内卡族、奥尼达族、奥农达加族、卡尤加族和莫霍克族)成立的版本,一部被称为< strong class="calibre6">Gayanashagowa 的史诗。至少在目前的背景下,这部史诗最引人注目的是,它在多大程度上代表了政治机构是人类自觉的创造物。当然,这个故事包含了神奇的元素。在某种意义上,主要人物 —— 和平缔造者 Deganawideh、国母 Jigonsaseh 等 —— 是创世神话中人物的转世。但文本中最强烈的是它对一个社会问题的表述,并有一个社会解决方案:关系破裂,国家陷入混乱和报复,螺旋式上升到社会秩序消失的地步,有权势的人变成了字面上的食人者。最有权势的是 Adodarhoh(Tadodaho),他被表现为一个女巫,畸形、怪异,能够命令别人听从他的命令。
The narrative centres on a hero, Deganawideh the Peacemaker, who appears from what is later to be the Attiwandaronk (Neutral) territory to the northwest, determined to put an end to this chaotic state of affairs. He wins to his cause first the Jigonsaseh, a woman famous for standing outside all quarrels (he finds her hosting and feeding war parties from all sides of the conflict); and then Hiawatha, one of Adodarhoh’s cannibal henchmen. Together they set about winning over the people of each nation to agree on creating a formal structure for heading off disputes and creating peace. Hence the system of titles, nested councils, consensus-finding, condolence rituals and the prominent role of female elders in formulating policy. In the story, the very last to be won over is Adodarhoh himself, who is gradually healed of his deformities and turned into a human being. In the end the laws of the League are ‘spoken into’ belts of wampum, which serves as its constitution; the records are transferred to the keeping of Adodarhoh; and, his work finished, the Peacemaker vanishes from the earth.
叙事的中心是一位英雄,和平缔造者德加纳维德,他从后来的西北阿提旺达隆克(中立国)领土出现,决心结束这种混乱的状态。他首先为自己的事业赢得了 Jigonsaseh,一个因站在所有争吵之外而闻名的女人(他发现她接待并喂养来自冲突各方的战争队伍);然后是 Hiawatha,Adodarhoh 的食人族随从之一。他们一起着手争取每个国家的人民同意建立一个正式的结构,以消除争端和创造和平。因此,有了头衔制度、嵌套的理事会、共识的寻求、慰问仪式以及女性长者在制定政策中的突出作用。在故事中,最后被征服的是阿多达霍本人,他的畸形逐渐被治愈,变成了一个人。最后,联盟的法律被 “说成” 了万普姆带,作为联盟的章程;记录被转移到阿多达霍的手中;而且,他的工作完成后,和平使者从地球上消失了。
Since Haudenosaunee names are passed on like titles, there has continued to be an Adodarhoh, just as there is also still a Jigonsaseh and Hiawatha, to this day. Forty-nine sachems, delegated to convey the decisions of their nation’s councils, continue to meet regularly. These meetings always begin with a rite of ‘condolence’, in which they wipe away the grief and rage caused by the memory of anyone who died in the interim, to clear their minds to go about the business of establishing peace (the fiftieth, the Peacemaker himself, is always represented by an empty place). This federal system was the peak of a complex apparatus of subordinate councils, male and female, all with carefully designated powers – but none with actual powers of compulsion.
由于豪德诺萨尼人的名字像头衔一样被传承下来,所以一直有一个阿多达霍,就像至今仍有一个吉冈塞斯和希瓦塔一样。四十九位萨奇姆被授权传达他们国家议会的决定,继续定期开会。这些会议总是以 “吊唁” 仪式开始,在这个仪式中,他们擦去因记忆中任何一个在这期间死去的人而引起的悲伤和愤怒,以清除他们的思想,去做建立和平的事情(第五十位,即和平缔造者本人,总是以一个空位代表)。这个联邦系统是一个复杂的下属委员会的顶峰,这些委员会有男有女,都有精心指定的权力 —— 但没有一个有实际的强制力。
In its essence, the story is not so different from the founding of the Osage social order: a terrifying witch is brought back into society, and in the process transformed into a peacemaker. The main difference is that, in this case, Adodarhoh is quite explicitly a ruler, one invested with power of command:
就其本质而言,这个故事与奥萨奇社会秩序的建立并无太大区别:一个可怕的女巫被带回社会,并在此过程中转变为和平使者。主要区别在于,在这种情况下,Adodarhoh 很明显是一个统治者,一个被赋予了指挥权的统治者。
South of the Onondaga town lived an evil-minded man. His lodge was in a swale and his nest was made of bulrushes. His body was distorted by seven crooks and his long tangled locks were adorned by withering living serpents. Moreover, this monster was a devourer of raw meat, even of human flesh. He was also a master of wizardry and by his magic he destroyed men but he could not be destroyed. Adodarhoh was the name of the evil man.
在奥农达加镇的南部,住着一个心地邪恶的人。他的住处在一个沼泽地里,他的巢穴是用灌木做成的。他的身体被七条弯刀扭曲,他纠结的长发被枯萎的活蛇装饰着。此外,这个怪物是一个吞食生肉的人,甚至是人类的肉。他也是一个巫术大师,通过他的魔法,他摧毁了人,但他不能被摧毁。Adodarhoh 是这个邪恶的人的名字。
Notwithstanding the evil character of Adodarhoh the people of Onondaga, the Nation of Many Hills, obeyed his commands and though it cost many lives they satisfied his insane whims, so much did they fear him and his sorcery.68
尽管阿多达霍性格邪恶,但多山之国奥农达加的人民还是服从了他的命令,虽然付出了很多生命的代价,但他们还是满足了他疯狂的怪念头,所以他们非常害怕他和他的巫术。68
It is an anthropological commonplace that if you want to get a sense of a society’s ultimate values it is best to look at what they consider to be the worst sort of behaviour; and that the best way to get a sense of what they consider to be the worst possible behaviour is by examining ideas about witches. For the Haudenosaunee, the giving of orders is represented as being almost as serious an outrage as the eating of human flesh.69
如果你想了解一个社会的终极价值观,最好是看看他们认为最糟糕的行为是什么;而了解他们认为最糟糕的行为的最好方法就是研究关于女巫的想法。对 Haudenosaunee 人来说,发号施令被认为是几乎与吃人肉一样严重的暴行。69
Representing Adodarhoh as a king might seem surprising, since there seems no reason to think that, before the arrival of Europeans, either the Five Nations or any of their immediate neighbours had any immediate experience of arbitrary command. This raises precisely the question often directed against arguments70 that indigenous institutions of chiefship were in fact designed to prevent any danger of states emerging: how could so many societies be organizing their entire political system around heading off something (i.e. ‘the state’) that they had never experienced? The straightforward response is that most of the narratives were gathered in the nineteenth century, by which time any indigenous American was likely to have had long and bitter experience of the United States government: men in uniforms carrying legal briefs, issuing arbitrary commands and much more besides. So perhaps this element was added to these narratives later?
将阿多达霍表现为国王似乎令人惊讶,因为似乎没有理由认为,在欧洲人到来之前,五族人或他们的任何近邻都有过任何直接的专制指挥经验。这恰恰提出了一个问题,那就是经常针对以下论点提出的问题70土著人的酋长制度实际上是为了防止出现任何国家的危险:这么多社会怎么可能围绕着防止他们从未经历过的东西(即 “国家”)来组织他们的整个政治体系?直截了当的回答是,大多数叙述都是在 19 世纪收集的,那时任何美洲土著人都可能对美洲政府有长期而痛苦的经历:穿着制服的人拿着法律文件,发布武断的命令,以及更多的东西。因此,也许这个元素是后来加入到这些叙述中的?
Anything is possible, of course, but this strikes us as unlikely.71
当然,任何事情都有可能,但这让我们觉得不太可能。71
Even in more recent times, the danger of being accused of witchcraft was deployed against office holders to ensure that none could accumulate any appreciable advantage over their fellows – particularly in wealth. Here we have to return to the Iroquoian theory about dreams as repressed desires, mentioned earlier in the chapter. One interesting twist of this theory is that it was considered the responsibility of others to realize a fellow community member’s dream: even if one dreamed of appropriating a neighbour’s possession, it could only be refused at the risk of endangering their health. To do so was considered beyond awkward; almost socially impossible. Even if one did it would cause outraged gossip, and very possibly bloody revenge: if somebody was thought to have died because somebody else refused to grant a soul wish, his or her relatives might retaliate physically, or by supernatural means.72
即使在更近的时代,被指控为巫术的危险也被用来对付任职者,以确保没有人能够比他们的同伴积累任何明显的优势 —— 特别是在财富。在这里,我们不得不回到本章前面提到的伊鲁克人关于梦是被压抑的欲望的理论。这个理论的一个有趣的转折是,实现社区成员的梦想被认为是其他人的责任:即使一个人梦想占有邻居的财产,也只能在危及他们健康的情况下拒绝。这样做被认为是很尴尬的;在社会上几乎是不可能的。即使这样做了,也会引起愤怒的流言蜚语,而且很可能是血腥的报复:如果有人被认为是因为别人拒绝实现灵魂的愿望而死亡,他或她的亲属可能会进行人身报复,或通过超自然的手段。72
Any member of an Iroquoian society given an order would have fiercely resisted it as a threat to their personal autonomy – but the one exception to this norm was, precisely, dreams.73 One Huron-Wendat chief gave away his prized European cat, which he had carried by canoe all the way from Quebec, to a woman who dreamed she could only be cured by owning it (Iroquoians also feared becoming the victims of witchcraft practised consciously or unconsciously by people who envied them). Dreams were treated as if they were commands, delivered either by one’s own soul or possibly, in the case of a particularly vivid or portentous dream, by some greater spirit. The spirit might be the Creator or some other spirit, perhaps entirely unknown. Dreamers could become prophets – if only, usually, for a relatively brief period of time.74 During that time, however, their orders had to be obeyed. (Needless to say, there were few more terrible crimes than to falsify a dream.)
伊鲁克社会的任何成员接到命令都会激烈抵制,认为这是对其个人自主权的威胁 —— 但这一准则的一个例外恰恰是梦。73一位休伦·温达族首领将他从魁北克一路用独木舟运来的珍贵的欧洲猫送给了一个梦见自己只有拥有它才能治愈的女人(伊鲁瓦人也害怕成为嫉妒他们的人自觉或不自觉地实施的巫术的受害者)。梦被当作是命令,由一个人自己的灵魂发出,或者在一个特别生动或预示性的梦的情况下,由某个更大的精神发出。这个精神可能是造物主或其他精神,也许是完全未知的。做梦的人可以成为先知 —— 如果只是,通常,在一个相对短暂的时期内。74然而,在这段时间里,他们的命令必须被服从。(不用说,很少有比伪造梦想更可怕的罪行。)
In other words, the image of the witch was at the centre of a complex of ideas that had everything to do with unconscious desire, including the unconscious desire to dominate, and the need both to realize it and to keep it under control.
换句话说,女巫的形象是一个思想综合体的中心,它与无意识的欲望有关,包括无意识的支配欲望,以及既要实现它又要控制它的需要。
How did all this come about, historically?
从历史上看,这一切是怎么来的?
The exact time and circumstance of the League of Five Nations’ creation is unclear; dates have been proposed ranging from AD 1142 to sometime around 1650.75 No doubt the creation of such confederacies was an ongoing process; and surely, like almost all historical epics, the Gayanashagowa patches together elements, many historically accurate, others less so, drawn from different periods of time. What we know from the archaeological record is that Iroquoian society as it existed in the seventeenth century began to take form around the same time as the heyday of Cahokia.
五国联盟成立的确切时间和情况尚不清楚;有人提出的日期从公元 1142 年到 1650 年左右的某个时间。75毫无疑问,这种联盟的建立是一个持续的过程;而且肯定的是,像几乎所有的历史史诗一样,Gayanashagowa把各种元素拼凑在一起,许多历史,其他则不那么准确,来自不同时期。我们从考古记录中得知,17 世纪存在的伊罗克人社会与卡霍基亚的全盛时期同时开始形成。
By around AD 1100 maize was being cultivated in Ontario, in what later became Attiwandaronk (Neutral) territory. Over the next several centuries, the ‘three sisters’ (corn, beans and squash) became ever more important in local diets – though Iroquoians were careful to balance the new crops with older traditions of hunting, fishing and foraging. The key period seems to be what’s called the Late Owasco phase, from AD 1230 to 1375, when people began to move away from their previous settlements (and from their earlier patterns of seasonal mobility) along waterways, settling in palisaded towns occupied all year around in which longhouses, presumably based in matrilineal clans, became the predominant form of dwelling. Many of these towns were quite substantial, containing as many as 2,000 inhabitants (that is, something approaching a quarter of the population of central Cahokia).76
到公元 1100 年左右,安大略省在后来成为阿提旺达隆克(中立)地区的地方开始种植玉米。在接下来的几个世纪里,“三姐妹”(玉米、豆类和南瓜)在当地的饮食中变得越来越重要 —— 尽管伊鲁克人很小心地在新的作物与古老的狩猎、捕鱼和觅食传统之间取得平衡。关键时期似乎是所谓的晚期 Owasco 阶段,从公元 1230 年到 1375 年,人们开始从以前的定居点(以及他们早期的季节性流动模式)沿水路迁移,定居在一年四季都有人居住的有栅栏的城镇,其中长屋(大概是以母系氏族为基础)成为主要的居住形式。这些城镇中的许多是相当大的,包含多达 2000 名居民(也就是说,接近卡霍基亚中部人口的四分之一)。76
References to cannibalism in the Gayanashagowa epic are not pure fantasy: endemic warfare and the torture and ceremonial sacrifice of war prisoners are sporadically documented from AD 1050. Some contemporary Haudenosaunee scholars think the myth refers to an actual conflict between political ideologies within Iroquoian societies at the time; turning especially on the importance of women, and agriculture, against defenders of an older male-dominated order where prestige was entirely based in war and hunting.77 (If so, it would not look so very different from the kind of ideological divergence we’ve suggested might have been taking place in the Middle East during the early phases of the Neolithic.)78 Some kind of compromise between these two positions appears to have been reached around the eleventh century AD, one result of which was a stabilizing of population at a modest level. Population numbers increased fairly quickly for two or three centuries after the widespread adoption of maize, squash and beans, but by the fifteenth century they had levelled off. The Jesuits later reported how Iroquoian women were careful to space their births, setting optimal population to the fish and game capacities of the region, not its potential agricultural productivity. In this way the cultural emphasis on male hunting actually reinforced the power and autonomy of Iroquoian women, who maintained their own councils and officials and whose power in local affairs at least was clearly greater than that of their men.79
Gayanashagowa 史诗中关于吃人的记载并不纯粹是幻想:从公元 1050 年开始,就有关于地方性战争以及对战俘的折磨和仪式性牺牲的零星记载。一些当代 Haudenosaunee 学者认为,这个神话指的是当时 Iroquoian 社会内部政治意识形态之间的实际冲突;尤其是在妇女和农业的重要性上,反对以男性为主导的旧秩序的捍卫者,在这种秩序中,威望完全建立在战争和狩猎上。77(如果是这样的话,它看起来与我们所建议的在新石器时代早期阶段可能在中东发生的那种意识形态分歧没有什么不同。)78这两种立场之间似乎在公元 11 世纪左右达成了某种妥协,其结果之一是将人口稳定在一个适度的水平。在广泛采用玉米、南瓜和豆类之后的两三个世纪里,人口数量增长相当快,但到了十五世纪,人口数量已经趋于平稳。耶稣会士后来报告了伊鲁克妇女如何小心翼翼地安排生育间隔,将最佳人口设定为该地区的鱼类和游戏能力,而不是其潜在的农业生产力。在这种情况下,强调男性狩猎的文化实际上加强了伊鲁克妇女的权力和自主性,她们有自己的理事会和官员,至少在地方事务中的权力明显大于她们的男人。79
In the period spanning the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, neither the Wendat Confederacy nor Haudenosaunee show much evidence of having extensive contact or even much trade with the Mississippians, whose main presence in the Northeast was in the Fort Ancient region along the Ohio River and the nearby Monongahela valley. This is not true, however, of the Attiwandaronk. By AD 1300, much of the Ontario area was indeed under Mississippian influence. It is doubtful, but not totally inconceivable, that there were migrations from the Cahokian heartland.80 Even if there weren’t, the Attiwandaronk appear to have been monopolizing trade to the south and through it to the Chesapeake Bay and beyond, leaving the Wendat and Haudenosaunee to form relations with Algonkian peoples to their north and east. The sixteenth century saw a sharp increase in Mississippian influences in Ontario, including various cult objects and ceremonial regalia, and even large numbers of chunkey stones of the same style that also appear at Fort Ancient.
在十二世纪至十四世纪期间,无论是温达特联盟还是豪德诺萨尼人都没有显示出与密西西比人有广泛接触甚至有很多贸易的证据,密西西比人在东北地区的主要存在是在俄亥俄河沿岸的古堡地区和附近的莫农加希拉山谷。然而,阿提旺达隆克人却不是这样的。到公元 1300 年,安大略省的大部分地区确实受到密西西比人的影响。是否有来自卡霍克人中心地带的移民值得怀疑,但也不是完全不可想象的。80即使没有,阿提旺达隆克人似乎一直垄断着南部的贸易,并通过它到切萨皮克湾和其他地方,让温达特人和 Haudenosaunee 与他们北部和东部的 Algonkian 人形成关系。十六世纪,密西西比人在安大略省的影响急剧增加,包括各种崇拜物和仪式上的礼节,甚至还有大量相同风格的 chunkey 石,也出现在古堡。
Archaeologists refer to all this as ‘Mississippianization’, and it is accompanied by strong evidence for a renewed burst of trade at least as far as Delaware culminating in, among other things, the arrival of enormous quantities of shells and shell beads derived from the mid-Atlantic seaboard from around 1610 onwards, to be piled up in Attiwandaronk tombs. By that time, the Attiwandaronk population was several times larger than any of the neighbouring confederations, Wendat, Haudenosaunee, let alone the Erie, Petun, Wenro or other small rivals; and its capital, Ounotisaston, was then among the largest settlements in the Northeast. (Scholars, predictably, argue about whether the Neutrals could thus qualify as a ‘simple chiefdom’ rather than a mere ‘tribe’.)
考古学家将这一切称为 “密西西比化”,同时有强有力的证据表明,至少在特拉华州,贸易的重新爆发达到了顶峰,其中包括从 1610 年左右开始,来自大西洋中部沿海地区的大量贝壳和贝珠的到来,被堆积在阿提旺达隆克的坟墓中。到那时,阿提旺达隆克的人口比任何一个邻近的联盟、温达特人、豪德诺萨尼人都要多几倍,更不用说伊利人、佩顿人、温罗人或其他小对手了;其首都奥诺蒂萨顿是当时东北地区最大的定居点之一。(可以预见的是,学者们对中立者是否因此有资格成为一个 “简单的酋长领地” 而不仅仅是一个 “部落” 争论不休。)
Certainly, the Jesuits who visited the region before Attiwandaronk society was, effectively, destroyed by plagues and famines were unanimous in insisting that its constitution was fundamentally different from that of its neighbours. We will probably never have the means to reconstruct precisely how. For instance, the French referred to the Attiwandaronk as ‘the Neutral Nation’ largely because they took no part in the near-constant conflicts between the various nations making up the Wendat and Haudenosaunee, but instead allowed war parties from both sides free passage through their territories. This echoes the behaviour attributed to the Jigonsaseh, Mother of Nations, the highest-ranking woman official among the later Haudenosaunee, in their national epic, who was indeed said to have been of Attiwandaronk origin. But at the same time the Attiwandaronk were in no sense neutral in their relations with many of their western and southern neighbours.
当然,在阿提旺达隆克社会实际上被瘟疫和饥荒摧毁之前,访问该地区的耶稣会士一致坚持认为,该地区的宪法与邻国的宪法有着根本的不同。我们可能永远没有办法准确地重建如何。例如,法国人将阿提旺达隆克称为 “中立国”,主要是因为他们没有参与构成温达特人和豪德诺萨尼人的各民族之间几乎持续不断的冲突,而是允许双方的战争各方自由通过其领土。这与后来豪德诺萨尼人的民族史诗中归于 “国母”Jigonsaseh 的行为相呼应,后者是豪德诺萨尼人中级别最高的女官员,据说她确实是阿提旺达隆克人。但与此同时,阿提旺达隆克人在与许多西方和南方邻国的关系中绝不是中立的。
Indeed, according to the Recollect Father Joseph de la Roche Daillon, in 1627 the Attiwandaronk were dominated by a warlord named Tsouharissen, ‘the chief of the greatest credit and authority that has ever been in all these nations, because he is not only chief of his town, but of all those of his nation … It is unexampled in the other nations to have a chief so absolute. He acquired this honour and power by his courage, and by having been many times at war against seventeen nations who are their enemies.’81 When he was away at war, in fact, the federal council (in all other Iroquoian societies the ultimate authority) could make no important decisions. Tsouharissen seems to have been something at least very like a king.
事实上,根据修会神父 Joseph de la Roche Daillon 的说法,1627 年阿提旺达隆克由一个叫 Tsouharissen 的军阀控制,“他是所有这些国家中最有信誉和权威的首领,因为他不仅是他的城市的首领,而且是他的国家的所有首领…… 在其他国家,有一个如此绝对的首领是没有的。他获得这种荣誉和权力是由于他的勇气,以及多次与十七个国家的敌人交战。81事实上,当他外出打仗时,联邦委员会(在所有其他伊鲁瓦社会中是最高权力机构)无法做出任何重要决定。Tsouharissen 似乎至少是一个很像国王的人。
What was the relation of Tsouharissen and the Jigonsaseh, a figure who came to exemplify principles of reconciliation that are in many ways precisely the opposite of kingship and self-aggrandizement? We don’t know. The only source we have for details of Tsouharissen’s life is very much contested, an oral history purporting to be the testimony of Tsouharissen’s third wife, passed down three centuries to the present day.82 Almost all historians discount it – but that isn’t necessarily an absolute disqualification. At any rate, according to the account Tsouharissen was a child prodigy, a brilliant student of esoteric knowledge. The story of his existence reached a certain Cherokee priest, who travelled to become his tutor; he found a great crystal which he said marked him as a reincarnation of the Sun and fought many wars and married four times. But when he decided to hand on his mantle to the daughter of his youngest Tuscarora wife, a similar child prodigy, disaster struck. So infuriated by this plan was his senior (Attiwandaronk) wife, of the highest-ranking Turtle clan, that she ambushed and killed the daughter, whose mother took her own life in despair. Tsouharissen, in a rage, massacred the culprit’s entire lineage, including his own heirs, thus effectively destroying any possibility of dynastic succession.
邹哈里森和吉格赛的关系是什么?吉格赛是一个在许多方面正好与王权和自我膨胀相反的和解原则的模范人物。我们不知道。我们所掌握的有关邹哈里森生活细节的唯一资料是非常有争议的,这是一段口述历史,据称是邹哈里森的第三任妻子的证词,流传了三个世纪,直到今天。82几乎所有的历史学家都对它不屑一顾 —— 但这并不一定是绝对的不合格。无论如何,根据这个说法,Tsouharissen 是一个神童,是一个杰出的深奥知识的学生。他的故事传到了某位切罗基教士那里,后者前往成为他的导师;他找到了一块巨大的水晶,他说这块水晶标志着他是太阳的转世,他打了很多仗,结了四次婚。但当他决定将他的衣钵传给他最小的图斯卡罗拉妻子的女儿,一个类似的神童时,灾难发生了。他的高级妻子(阿提旺达隆克人)被这个计划激怒了,她是最高级别的海龟族人,她伏击并杀死了这个女儿,她的母亲在绝望中自杀了。Tsouharissen 一怒之下,屠杀了罪魁祸首的整个家族,包括他自己的继承人,从而有效地破坏了王朝继承的任何可能性。
As we say, we have no idea how much credit to give the story: but we do know that its broad outlines reflect realities. Attiwandaronk at that time did indeed have regular connections with nations as far away as the Cherokee; while the problems of how to square esoteric knowledge with democratic institutions, or even the difficulties faced by powerful men trying to establish dynasties when descent was organized according to matrilineal clans with no internal ranking, would have been familiar issues in North America at that time. Tsouharissen definitely existed, and he did apparently try to translate his success as a warrior into centralized power. We also know it ultimately came to nothing. We just don’t know if it really came to nothing in this particular way.
正如我们所说,我们不知道应该给予这个故事多大的信任:但我们知道,它的大致轮廓反映了现实。当时的阿提旺达隆克确实与远在切罗基的民族有经常性的联系;而如何将深奥的知识与民主制度结合起来的问题,甚至当血统是按照没有内部等级的母系氏族组织的时候,有权势的人试图建立王朝所面临的困难,在当时的北美都是熟悉的问题。Tsouharissen 肯定是存在的,而且他显然曾试图将他作为战士的成功转化为中央集权。我们也知道它最终一无所获。我们只是不知道它是否真的以这种特殊的方式归于失败。
By the time Baron de Lahontan was serving with the French army in Canada, and Kandiaronk was holding forth on questions of political theory at his periodic dinners with Governor Frontenac, the Attiwandaronk no longer existed. Still, the events surrounding Tsouharissen’s life were likely to have been familiar to Kandiaronk, as they would have been vivid childhood memories for many of the elders known to him in his formative years. The Jigonsaseh, Mother of Nations, for instance, was still very much alive, the last Attiwandaronk holder of the title having been incorporated in the Wolf clan of the Seneca in 1650. She remained established in her traditional seat, a fortress called Kienuka overlooking the Niagara gorge.83 Either that Jigonsaseh – or, more likely, her successor – was still there in 1687, when Louis XIV decided to put an end to the ongoing threat the Five Nations posed to French settlement by sending a seasoned military commander, the Marquis de Denonville, as governor, with orders to use whatever force necessary to drive the Nations from what is now upstate New York.
当拉洪坦男爵在加拿大的法国军队中服役,而坎迪阿伦克在与弗朗特纳克总督的定期晚宴上谈论政治理论问题时,阿提旺达隆克已经不存在了。不过,围绕邹哈里森的生活所发生的事件很可能是坎迪阿伦克所熟悉的,因为这些事件对他成长过程中所认识的许多长者来说都是生动的童年记忆。例如,民族之母 Jigonsaseh 仍然健在,最后一位阿提旺达隆克的头衔持有人在 1650 年被纳入塞内卡的狼族。她仍然定居在她的传统所在地,一个俯瞰尼亚加拉峡谷的名为基努卡的堡垒。831687 年,路易十四决定结束五族人对法国人定居的持续威胁,派经验丰富的军事指挥官德农维尔侯爵担任总督,命令他使用任何必要的武力将五族人赶出现在的纽约州北部,这时吉冈萨西 —— 或者更可能是她的继任者 —— 仍然在那里。
We have a report on what happened from Lahontan’s own memoirs. Feigning interest in a peace settlement, Denonville invited the League council, as a body, to negotiate terms in a place called Fort Frontenac (after the former governor). Some 200 delegates arrived, including all the permanent officers of the confederation and many from the women’s councils as well. Summarily arresting them, Denonville shipped them off to France to serve as galley slaves. Then, taking advantage of the resulting confusion, he ordered his men to invade the Five Nations’ territory. (Lahontan, who strongly disapproved of the proceedings, got himself into trouble for trying to intervene and stop some underlings from casually torturing the prisoners – he was ordered away, but in the end spared further sanction after protesting that he had been drunk. Some years later, in a different context, an order was put out for his arrest on grounds of insubordination, and he had to flee to Amsterdam.)84
我们从拉洪坦自己的回忆录中得到了一份关于所发生的事情的报告。德农维尔假装对和平解决感兴趣,邀请联盟理事会作为一个机构,在一个叫弗朗特纳克堡的地方(以前总督的名字命名)谈判条款。大约 200 名代表来到这里,其中包括联盟的所有常任官员和许多妇女委员会的代表。德农维尔逮捕了他们,将他们运往法国充当船队奴隶。然后,他利用由此产生的混乱,命令他的手下入侵五族人的领土。(拉洪坦强烈反对这一行动,他试图干预并阻止一些下属随意折磨囚犯,因此惹上了麻烦 —— 他被命令离开,但最后在抗议说他喝醉了之后,免于受到进一步制裁。几年后,在不同的情况下,有人以不服从命令为由发出了逮捕他的命令,他不得不逃到了阿姆斯特丹。)84
The Jigonsaseh, however, had chosen not to attend Denonville’s meeting. The arrest of the entire Grand Council left her the highest-ranking League official. Since in such an emergency there was no time to raise new chiefs, she and the remaining clan mothers themselves raised an army. Many of those recruited, it is reported, were themselves Seneca women. As it turned out, the Jigonsaseh was a far superior military tactician to Denonville. After routing the invading French troops near Victor, New York, her forces were at the point of entering Montreal when the French government sued for peace, agreeing to dismantle Fort Niagara and return the surviving galley slaves.85 When Lahontan later notes that, like Kandiaronk, ‘those who had been galley slaves in France’ were highly critical of French institutions, he is referring largely to those taken prisoner on this occasion – or more specifically the dozen or so, out of the original 200, who made it back alive.
然而,吉冈塞人选择不参加德农维尔的会议。整个大议会的被捕使她成为联盟最高级别的官员。由于在这样的紧急情况下,没有时间培养新的酋长,她和剩下的族长们自己组建了一支军队。据报道,许多被招募的人本身就是塞内卡妇女。事实证明,吉贡塞赫是一位远胜于德农维尔的军事战术家。在纽约维克多附近击溃入侵的法国军队后,她的部队正准备进入蒙特利尔时,法国政府提出了和平请求,同意拆除尼亚加拉堡并归还幸存的船队奴隶。85当拉洪坦后来指出,像坎迪阿伦克一样,“那些曾在法国当过船队奴隶的人” 对法国的制度持高度批评态度时,他指的主要是这次被俘的人 —— 或者更确切地说,在最初的 200 人中,有十几个人活着回来了。
In such a lethal context, why draw attention to the depredations of a self-appointed lord such as Tsouharissen? What his example demonstrates, we suggest, is that even within indigenous society, the political question was never definitively settled. Certainly, the overall direction, in the wake of Cahokia, was a broad movement away from overlords of any sort and towards constitutional structures carefully worked out to distribute power in such a way that they would never return. But the possibility that they might always lurked in the background. Other paradigms of governance existed, and ambitious men – or women – could, if occasion allowed, appeal to them. After her defeat of Denonville the Jigonsaseh appears to have demobilized her army and returned to the process of selecting new officials to reconstitute the Great Council. If she had chosen to act otherwise, however, precedents were available.
在这样一个致命的背景下,为什么要提请人们注意像 Tsouharissen 这样一个自封的领主的掠夺行为?我们认为,他的例子所表明的是,即使在土著社会中,政治问题也从未得到明确的解决。当然,在卡霍基亚事件之后,总的方向是一个广泛的运动,即远离任何形式的霸主,转向精心制定的宪法结构,以这种方式分配权力,使他们再也不会回来。但是,他们的可能性总是潜伏在背景中。其他的治理模式是存在的,如果情况允许,雄心勃勃的男人 —— 或女人 —— 可以向他们发出呼吁。在击败德农维尔后,吉贡塞似乎已经遣散了她的军队,并回到了挑选新官员的过程中,以重组大议会。不过,如果她选择了其他的行动,也有先例可循。
It was precisely this combination of such conflicting ideological possibilities – and, of course, the Iroquoian penchant for prolonged political argument – that lay behind what we have called the indigenous critique of European society. It would be impossible to understand the origins of its particular emphasis on individual liberty, for instance, outside that context. Those ideas about liberty had a profound impact on the world. In other words, not only did indigenous North Americans manage almost entirely to sidestep the evolutionary trap that we assume must always lead, eventually, from agriculture to the rise of some all-powerful state or empire; but in doing so they developed political sensibilities that were ultimately to have a deep influence on Enlightenment thinkers and, through them, are still with us today.
恰恰是这种矛盾的意识形态可能性的结合 —— 当然,还有伊鲁克人对长期政治争论的偏好 —— 才是我们所说的欧洲社会的本土批判的背后。例如,要理解其特别强调个人自由的起源,就不可能脱离这一背景。这些关于自由的想法对世界产生了深远的影响。换句话说,北美土著人不仅设法几乎完全避开了进化的陷阱,我们认为这种陷阱最终一定会从农业导致一些全能的国家或帝国的崛起;而且在这样做的过程中,他们发展了政治敏感性,最终对启蒙思想家产生了深刻的影响,并通过他们,至今仍与我们同在。
In this sense, at least, the Wendat won the argument. It would be impossible for a European today, or anyone, really – whatever they actually thought – to take a position like that of the seventeenth-century Jesuits and simply declare themselves opposed to the very principle of human freedom.
至少在这个意义上,温达特人赢得了这场争论。今天的欧洲人,或者任何一个人,真的 —— 无论他们实际上是怎么想的 —— 都不可能采取像十七世纪耶稣会士那样的立场,简单地宣布自己反对人类自由的原则。
This book began with an appeal to ask better questions. We started out by observing that to inquire after the origins of inequality necessarily means creating a myth, a fall from grace, a technological transposition of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis – which, in most contemporary versions, takes the form of a mythical narrative stripped of any prospect of redemption. In these accounts, the best we humans can hope for is some modest tinkering with our inherently squalid condition – and hopefully, dramatic action to prevent any looming, absolute disaster. The only other theory on offer to date has been to assume that there were no origins of inequality, because humans are naturally somewhat thuggish creatures and our beginnings were a miserable, violent affair; in which case ‘progress’ or ‘civilization’ – driven forward, largely, by our own selfish and competitive nature – was itself redemptive. This view is extremely popular among billionaires but holds little appeal to anyone else, including scientists, who are keenly aware that it isn’t in accord with the facts.
这本书以呼吁人们提出更好的问题开始。我们一开始就注意到,探究不平等的起源必然意味着创造一个神话,一个堕落,一个对《创世纪》第一章的技术移植 —— 在大多数当代版本中,《创世纪》采取的是一个被剥夺了任何救赎前景的神话叙述的形式。在这些叙述中,我们人类所能希望的是对我们固有的肮脏状况进行一些适度的修补,并希望有戏剧性的行动来防止任何迫在眉睫的绝对灾难。迄今为止,唯一的另一种理论是假设没有不平等的起源,因为人类天生是有点暴徒的生物,我们的开始是一个悲惨的、暴力的事件;在这种情况下,“进步” 或 “文明” —— 主要由我们自己的自私和竞争的本性推动 —— 本身就是一种救赎。这种观点在亿万富翁中非常流行,但对其他任何人都没有吸引力,包括科学家,他们敏锐地意识到这是不符合事实的。
It’s hardly surprising, perhaps, that most people feel a spontaneous affinity with the tragic version of the story, and not just because of its scriptural roots. The more rosy, optimistic narrative – whereby the progress of Western civilization inevitably makes everyone happier, wealthier and more secure – has at least one obvious disadvantage. It fails to explain why that civilization did not simply spread of its own accord; that is, why European powers should have been obliged to spend the last 500 or so years aiming guns at people’s heads in order to force them to adopt it. (Also, if being in a ‘savage’ state was so inherently miserable, why so many of those same Westerners, given an informed choice, were so eager to defect to it at the earliest opportunity.) During the nineteenth-century heyday of European imperialism, everyone seemed more keenly aware of this. While we remember that age as one of naive faith in ‘the inevitable march of progress’, liberal, Turgot-style progress was actually never really the dominant narrative in Victorian social theory, let alone political thought.
也许,大多数人对这个故事的悲剧版本感到自发的亲近,这并不奇怪,而不仅仅是因为它的圣经根源。更加美好、乐观的叙述 —— 西方文明的进步不可避免地使每个人更快乐、更富有、更安全 —— 至少有一个明显的缺点。它未能解释为什么这种文明没有简单地自行传播;也就是说,为什么欧洲列强不得不在过去 500 多年里用枪指着人们的头,以迫使他们采用这种文明。(另外,如果身处 “野蛮” 状态是如此内在的悲惨,为什么那么多同样的西方人,如果有一个的选择,却如此渴望尽早投奔它。)在 19 世纪欧洲帝国主义的全盛时期,每个人似乎都更敏锐地意识到了这一点。虽然我们记得那个时代对 “不可避免的进步” 抱有天真的信心,但自由主义、涂尔干式的进步实际上从未真正成为维多利亚时代社会理论的主流叙事,更不用说政治思想。
In fact, European statesmen and intellectuals of that time were just as likely to be obsessed with the dangers of decadence and disintegration. Many were overt racists who held that most humans are not capable of progress, and therefore looked forward to their physical extermination. Even those who did not share such views tended to feel that Enlightenment schemes for improving the human condition had been catastrophically naive. Social theory, as we know it today, emerged largely from the ranks of such reactionary thinkers, who – looking back over their shoulders at the turbulent consequences of the French Revolution – were less concerned with disasters being visited on peoples overseas than on growing misery and public unrest at home. As a result, the social sciences were conceived and organized around two core questions: (1) what had gone wrong with the project of Enlightenment, with the unity of scientific and moral progress, and with schemes for the improvement of human society? And: (2) why is it that well-meaning attempts to fix society’s problems so often end up making things even worse?
事实上,当时的欧洲政治家和知识分子也同样痴迷于颓废和瓦解的危险。许多人是公开的种族主义者,他们认为大多数人类没有能力取得进步,因此期待着他们的肉体灭绝。即使那些不同意这种观点的人也倾向于认为,启蒙运动关于改善人类状况的计划是灾难性的天真。我们今天所知道的社会理论,在很大程度上是从这些反动思想家的队伍中产生的,他们 —— 回过头来看法国大革命的动荡后果 —— 不太关心海外人民遭受的灾难,而是关心国内日益严重的苦难和公共动荡。因此,社会科学是围绕两个核心问题来构思和组织的。(1)启蒙运动项目、科学和道德进步的统一以及改善人类社会的计划出了什么问题?还有。(2)为什么善意的解决社会问题的尝试往往会使事情变得更加糟糕?
Why, these conservative thinkers asked, did it prove so difficult for Enlightenment revolutionaries to put their ideas into practice? Why couldn’t we just imagine a more rational social order and then legislate it into existence? Why did the passion for liberty, equality and fraternity end up producing the Terror? There must surely be some underlying reasons.
这些保守的思想家问道,为什么事实证明启蒙运动的革命者将他们的思想付诸实践是如此困难?为什么我们不能想象一个更合理的社会秩序,然后通过立法使其存在?为什么对自由、平等和博爱的热情最终产生了恐怖?肯定有一些潜在的原因。
If nothing else, these preoccupations help to explain the continued relevance of an otherwise not particularly successful eighteenth-century Swiss musician named Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Those primarily concerned with the first question saw him as the first to ask it in a quintessentially modern way. Those mainly concerned with the second were able to represent him as the ultimate clueless villain, a simple-minded revolutionary who felt that the established order, being irrational, could simply be brushed aside. Many held Rousseau personally responsible for the guillotine. By contrast, few nowadays read the ‘traditionalists’ of the nineteenth century, but they’re actually important since it is they, not the Enlightenment philosophes, who are really responsible for modern social theory. It’s long been recognized that almost all the great issues of modern social science – tradition, solidarity, authority, status, alienation, the sacred – were first raised in the works of men like the theocratic Vicomte de Bonald, the monarchist Comte de Maistre, or the Whig politician and philosopher Edmund Burke as examples of the kind of stubborn social realities which they felt that Enlightenment thinkers, and Rousseau in particular, had refused to take seriously, with (they insisted) disastrous results.
如果不出意外的话,这些关注点有助于解释一个名叫让·雅克·卢梭的 18 世纪瑞士音乐家在其他方面并不特别成功的持续相关性。那些主要关注第一个问题的人认为他是第一个以典型的现代方式提出问题的人。那些主要关注第二个问题的人能够将他描述为最终的无知小人,一个头脑简单的革命者,他认为既定的秩序是不合理的,可以简单地撇开。许多人认为卢梭,对断头台负有个人责任。相比之下,现在很少有人阅读 19 世纪的 “传统主义者”,但他们实际上很重要,因为真正对现代社会理论负责的是他们,而不是启蒙哲学家。人们早就认识到,现代社会科学的几乎所有重大问题 —— 传统、团结、权威、地位、异化、神圣 —— 都是在一些人的作品中首次提出的,比如神权主义的博纳德子爵、君主主义的麦斯特伯爵,或者辉格党政治家和哲学家埃德蒙·伯克,他们认为启蒙思想家,尤其是卢梭,拒绝认真对待这种顽固的社会现实,(他们坚持认为)结果是灾难性的。
These nineteenth-century debates between radicals and reactionaries never really ended; they keep resurfacing in different forms. Nowadays, for instance, those on the right are more likely to see themselves as defenders of Enlightenment values, and those on the left its most ardent critics. But over the course of the argument all parties have come to agree on one key point: that there was indeed something called ‘the Enlightenment’, that it marked a fundamental break in human history, and that the American and French Revolutions were in some sense the result of this rupture. The Enlightenment is seen as introducing a possibility that had simply not existed before: that of self-conscious projects for reshaping society in accord with some rational ideal. That is, of genuine revolutionary politics. Obviously, insurrections and visionary movements had existed before the eighteenth century. No one could deny that. But such pre-Enlightenment social movements could now largely be dismissed as so many examples of people insisting on a return to certain ‘ancient ways’ (that they had often just made up), or else claiming to act on a vision from God (or the local equivalent).
十九世纪激进派和反动派之间的这些辩论从未真正结束;它们不断以不同的形式重新浮现。例如,如今,那些右派更有可能将自己视为启蒙价值观的捍卫者,而左派则是启蒙价值观最热心的批评者。但在争论的过程中,所有各方都在一个关键点上达成了共识:确实有一种叫做 “启蒙运动” 的东西,它标志着人类历史的一个根本性断裂,而美洲革命和法国革命在某种意义上是这种断裂的结果。启蒙运动被视为引入了一种以前根本不存在的可能性:即按照某种理性理想重塑社会的自觉项目。也就是说,真正的革命政治。显然,在十八世纪之前,叛乱和幻想运动就已经存在了。没有人可以否认这一点。但这种启蒙前的社会运动现在基本上可以被视为人们坚持回归某些 “古老的方式”(这些方式往往是他们编造出来的),或者声称根据上帝(或当地人)的愿景采取行动的许多例子。
Pre-Enlightenment societies, or so this argument goes, were ‘traditional’ societies, founded on community, status, authority and the sacred. They were societies in which human beings did not ultimately act for themselves, individually or collectively. Rather, they were slaves of custom; or, at best, agents of inexorable social forces which they projected on to the cosmos in the form of gods, ancestors or other supernatural powers. Supposedly, only modern, post-Enlightenment people had the capacity to self-consciously intervene in history and change its course; on this everyone suddenly seemed to agree, no matter how virulently they might disagree about whether it was a good idea to do so.
启蒙运动前的社会,或者说这种说法,是 “传统” 社会,建立在社区、地位、权威和神圣之上。在这些社会中,人类最终并不为自己单独或集体地行动。相反,他们是习俗的奴隶;或者,充其量是不可抗拒的社会力量的代理人,他们以神、祖先或其他超自然力量的形式将其投射到宇宙。 据称,只有现代的、启蒙运动后的人们才有能力自觉地干预历史并改变其进程;在这一点上,每个人似乎都突然同意了,不管他们对这样做是否是一个好主意有多么激烈的分歧。
All this might seem a bit of a caricature, and only a minority of authors were willing to state matters quite so bluntly. Yet most modern thinkers have clearly found it bizarre to attribute self-conscious social projects or historical designs to people of earlier epochs. Generally, such ‘non-modern’ folk were considered too simple-minded (not having achieved ‘social complexity’); or to be living in a kind of mystical dreamworld; or, at best, were thought to be simply adapting themselves to their environment at an appropriate level of technology. Anthropology, it must be confessed, did not play a stellar role here.
所有这些可能看起来有点滑稽,只有少数作者愿意如此直截了当地说明问题。然而,大多数现代思想家显然发现,把自觉的社会项目或历史设计归于早期时代的人是很奇怪的。一般来说,这些 “非现代” 的人被认为头脑太简单(没有达到 “社会复杂性”);或者生活在一种神秘的梦境中;或者,最多只是被认为在适当的技术水平上使自己适应环境。必须承认的是,人类学在这里并没有发挥巨大的作用。
For much of the twentieth century, anthropologists tended to describe the societies they studied in ahistorical terms, as living in a kind of eternal present. Some of this was an effect of the colonial situation under which much ethnographic research was carried out. The British Empire, for instance, maintained a system of indirect rule in various parts of Africa, India and the Middle East where local institutions like royal courts, earth shrines, associations of clan elders, men’s houses and the like were maintained in place, indeed fixed by legislation. Major political change – forming a political party, say, or leading a prophetic movement – was in turn entirely illegal, and anyone who tried to do such things was likely to be put in prison. This obviously made it easier to describe the people anthropologists studied as having a way of life that was timeless and unchanging.
在二十世纪的大部分时间里,人类学家倾向于用非历史的术语来描述他们所研究的社会,认为他们生活在一种永恒的现在。这其中有一部分是殖民主义形势的影响,很多人种学研究是在这种形势下进行的。例如,大英帝国在非洲、印度和中东的不同地区维持着一种间接的统治体系,在那里,像王室法庭、土地祠堂、氏族长老会、男人的房子等地方机构被保留下来,实际上是通过立法固定下来。重大的政治变革 —— 例如组建政党或领导预言运动 —— 又是完全非法的,任何试图做这些事情的人都可能被关进监狱。这显然使人类学家更容易将所研究的人描述为拥有一种永恒不变的生活方式。
Since historical events are by definition unpredictable, it seemed more scientific to study those phenomena one could in fact predict: the things that kept happening, over and over, in roughly the same way. In a Senegalese or Burmese village this might mean describing the daily round, seasonal cycles, rites of passage, patterns of dynastic succession, or the growing and splitting of villages, always emphasizing how the same structure ultimately endured. Anthropologists wrote this way because they considered themselves scientists (‘structural-functionalists’, in the jargon of the day). In doing so they made it much easier for those reading their descriptions to imagine that the people being studied were quite the opposite of scientists: that they were trapped in a mythological universe where nothing changed and very little really happened. When Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian historian of religion, proposed that ‘traditional’ societies lived in ‘cyclical time’, innocent of history, he was simply drawing the obvious conclusion. As a matter of fact, he went even further.
由于历史事件在定义上是不可预测的,所以研究那些事实上可以预测的现象似乎更科学:那些不断发生的事情,一次又一次,以大致相同的方式。在塞内加尔或缅甸的村庄里,这可能意味着描述每天的轮回、季节性周期、通过仪式、王朝的继承模式,或村庄的增长和分裂,总是强调同一结构最终是如何延续的。人类学家这样写是因为他们认为自己是科学家(用当时的行话说是 “结构·功能主义者”)。这样一来,他们让阅读他们描述的人更容易想象被研究的人与科学家截然相反:他们被困在一个神话般的宇宙中,在那里没有任何变化,很少有真正发生的事情。当伟大的罗马尼亚宗教史家米尔恰·埃利亚德提出 “传统” 社会生活在 “周期性时间” 中,不受历史影响时,他只是得出了一个明显的结论。事实上,他甚至走得更远。
In traditional societies, according to Eliade, everything important has already happened. All the great founding gestures go back to mythic times, the illo tempore,1 the dawn of everything, when animals could talk or turn into humans, sky and earth were not yet separated, and it was possible to create genuinely new things (marriage, or cooking, or war). People living in this mental world, he felt, saw their own actions as simply repeating the creative gestures of gods and ancestors in less powerful ways, or as invoking primordial powers through ritual. According to Eliade, historical events thus tended to merge into archetypes. If anyone in what he considered a traditional society does do something remarkable – establishes or destroys a city, creates a unique piece of music – the deed will eventually end up being attributed to some mythic figure anyway. The alternative notion, that history is actually going somewhere (the Last Days, Judgment, Redemption), is what Eliade referred to as ‘linear time’, in which historical events take on significance in relation to the future, not just the past.
根据埃利亚德的说法,在传统社会中,一切重要的事情都已经发生。所有伟大的建国姿态都可以追溯到神话时代,即 illo tempore。1那时动物可以说话或变成人,天空和大地还没有分开,而且有可能创造出真正的新事物(婚姻、烹饪或战争)。他认为,生活在这个精神世界中的人们把自己的行为看作是以不太强大的方式重复神和祖先的创造性姿态,或通过仪式调用原始的力量。根据埃利亚德的说法,历史事件因此倾向于合并成原型。如果在他所认为的传统社会中,任何人做了一件了不起的事情 —— 建立或摧毁了一座城市,创造了一首独特的音乐 —— 无论如何,这件事最终会被归结为某个神话人物。另一种观念,即历史实际上是要去某个地方的(最后的日子、审判、救赎),就是艾利亚德所说的 “线性时间”,在这种情况下,历史事件具有与未来有关的意义,而不仅仅是过去。
And this ‘linear’ sense of time, Eliade insisted, was a relatively recent innovation in human thought, one with catastrophic social and psychological consequences. In his view, embracing the notion that events unfold in cumulative sequences, as opposed to recapitulating some deeper pattern, rendered us less able to weather the vicissitudes of war, injustice and misfortune, plunging us instead into an age of unprecedented anxiety and, ultimately, nihilism. The political implications of this position were, to say the least, unsettling. Eliade himself had been close to the fascist Iron Guard in his student days, and his basic argument was that the ‘terror of history’ (as he sometimes called it) was introduced by Judaism and the Old Testament – which he saw as paving the way for the further disasters of Enlightenment thought. Being Jewish, the authors of the present book don’t particularly appreciate the suggestion that we are somehow to blame for everything that went wrong in history. Still, for present purposes, what’s startling is that anyone ever took this sort of argument seriously.
埃利亚德坚持认为,这种 “线性” 的时间感是人类思想中相对较新的创新,具有灾难性的社会和心理后果。在他看来,接受事件以累积序列展开的概念,而不是重述某种更深层次的模式,使我们更难经受战争、不公正和不幸的沧桑,反而使我们陷入一个空前焦虑的时代,最终成为虚无主义。这一立场的政治含义,至少可以说是令人不安的。埃利亚德本人在学生时代就与法西斯铁卫队关系密切,他的基本论点是,“历史的恐怖”(他有时称之为)是由犹太教和《旧约》引入的 —— 他认为这是为启蒙思想的进一步灾难铺平道路。作为犹太人,本书的作者并不特别欣赏这样的说法,即我们在某种程度上应该为历史上的一切错误负责。不过,就目前的目的而言,令人吃惊的是,竟然有人认真对待这种说法。
Imagine we tried applying Eliade’s distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘traditional’ societies to the full scope of the human past, on the sort of scale we’ve been covering in the preceding chapters. Would this not have to mean that most of history’s great discoveries – for example the first weaving of fabrics, or the first navigations of the Pacific Ocean, or the invention of metallurgy – were made by people who didn’t believe in discovery or in history? This seems unlikely. The only alternative would be to argue that most human societies only became ‘traditional’ more recently: perhaps they each eventually found a state of equilibrium, settled into it and all came up with a shared ideological framework to justify their newfound condition. Which would mean there actually was some kind of previous illo tempore or time of creation, when all humans were capable of thinking and acting in the kind of highly creative ways we now consider quintessentially modern; one of their major achievements apparently being to find a way of abolishing most future prospects of innovation.
想象一下,我们试图将埃利亚德在 “历史” 和 “传统” 社会之间的区别应用于人类过去的全部范围,就像我们在前几章中所涉及的那种规模。这是否意味着历史上大多数的伟大发现 —— 例如第一次织布,或第一次在太平洋上航行,或冶金术的发明 —— 是由那些不相信发现或历史的人做出的?这似乎不太可能。唯一的选择是认为大多数人类社会只是在最近才变得 “传统”:也许他们最终都找到了一种平衡状态,并在其中安顿下来,而且都想出了一个共同的意识形态框架来证明他们新发现的状况。这将意味着实际上存在着某种先前的“时间”(illo tempore)或创造的时间,当时所有的人类都能够以我们现在认为典型的现代方式进行思考和行动;他们的主要成就之一显然是找到一种废除大多数未来创新前景的方法。
Both positions are, self-evidently, quite absurd.
不言而喻,这两种立场都是非常荒谬的。
Why are we entertaining such ideas? Why does it seem so odd, even counter-intuitive, to imagine people of the remote past as making their own history (even if not under conditions of their own choosing)? Part of the answer no doubt lies in how we have come to define science itself, and social science in particular.
我们为什么会有这样的想法?为什么想象遥远的过去的人们创造他们自己的历史(即使不是在他们自己选择的条件下)看起来如此奇怪,甚至是反直觉的呢?部分答案无疑在于我们是如何定义科学本身的,尤其是社会科学。
Social science has been largely a study of the ways in which human beings are not free: the way that our actions and understandings might be said to be determined by forces outside our control. Any account which appears to show human beings collectively shaping their own destiny, or even expressing freedom for its own sake, will likely be written off as illusory, awaiting ‘real’ scientific explanation; or if none is forthcoming (why do people dance?), as outside the scope of social theory entirely. This is one reason why most ‘big histories’ place such a strong focus on technology. Dividing up the human past according to the primary material from which tools and weapons were made (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) or else describing it as a series of revolutionary breakthroughs (Agricultural Revolution, Urban Revolution, Industrial Revolution), they then assume that the technologies themselves largely determine the shape that human societies will take for centuries to come – or at least until the next abrupt and unexpected breakthrough comes along to change everything again.
社会科学在很大程度上是对人类不自由的方式的研究:我们的行动和理解可以说是由我们控制之外的力量决定的。任何显示人类集体塑造自己的命运,甚至为了自由而表达自由的说法,都可能被写成虚幻的,等待 “真正的” 科学解释;或者如果没有的话(为什么人们会跳舞),则完全超出了社会理论的范围。这就是为什么大多数 “大历史” 对技术如此重视的一个原因。根据制造工具和武器的主要材料(石器时代、青铜时代、铁器时代)来划分人类的过去,或者将其描述为一系列革命性的突破(农业革命、城市革命、工业革命),然后他们假设技术本身在很大程度上决定了人类社会在未来几个世纪的形态 —— 或者至少在下一个突然和意外的突破出现,再次改变一切之前。
Now, we are hardly about to deny that technologies play an important role in shaping society. Obviously, technologies are important: each new invention opens up social possibilities that had not existed before. At the same time, it’s very easy to overstate the importance of new technologies in setting the overall direction of social change. To take an obvious example, the fact that Teotihuacanos or Tlaxcalteca employed stone tools to build and maintain their cities, while the inhabitants of Mohenjo-daro or Knossos used metal, seems to have made surprisingly little difference to those cities’ internal organization or even size. Nor does our evidence support the notion that major innovations always occur in sudden, revolutionary bursts, transforming everything in their wake. (This, as you’ll recall, was one of the main points to emerge from the two chapters we devoted to the origins of farming.)
现在,我们几乎不打算否认技术在塑造社会方面的重要作用。显然,技术是重要的:每一项新的发明都开启了以前不存在的社会可能性。同时,我们很容易夸大新技术在确定社会变革的总体方向方面的重要性。举个明显的例子,特奥蒂瓦卡诺人或特拉斯卡尔特卡人使用石器建造和维护他们的城市,而摩亨佐·达罗或克诺索斯的居民则使用金属,这一事实似乎对这些城市的内部组织甚至规模都没有产生令人惊讶的影响。我们的证据也不支持这样的观点,即重大创新总是在突然的、革命性的爆发中发生,在它们之后改变了一切。(你会记得,这是我们专门讨论农业起源的两章中出现的主要观点之一。)
Nobody, of course, claims that the beginnings of agriculture were anything quite like, say, the invention of the steam-powered loom or the electric light bulb. We can be fairly certain there was no Neolithic equivalent of Edmund Cartwright or Thomas Edison, who came up with the conceptual breakthrough that set everything in motion. Still, it often seems difficult for contemporary writers to resist the idea that some sort of similarly dramatic break with the past must have occurred. In fact, as we’ve seen, what actually took place was nothing like that. Instead of some male genius realizing his solitary vision, innovation in Neolithic societies was based on a collective body of knowledge accumulated over centuries, largely by women, in an endless series of apparently humble but in fact enormously significant discoveries. Many of those Neolithic discoveries had the cumulative effect of reshaping everyday life every bit as profoundly as the automatic loom or lightbulb.
当然,没有人声称农业的开端与蒸汽动力织布机或电灯泡的发明完全一样。我们可以相当肯定的是,新石器时代没有相当于埃德蒙·卡特赖特或托马斯·爱迪生的人,他们想出了概念上的突破,使一切都在运转。然而,当代作家似乎常常难以抵制这样的想法,即一定发生过某种类似的与过去的戏剧性突破。事实上,正如我们所看到的,实际发生的事情并不像那样。新石器时代社会的创新不是由某个男性天才实现其孤独的愿景,而是基于几个世纪以来积累的集体知识,这些知识主要是由妇女完成的,是一系列无休止的表面上卑微但实际上意义巨大的发现。许多这些新石器时代的发现具有重塑日常生活的累积效应,其深刻程度不亚于自动织布机或电灯泡。
Every time we sit down to breakfast, we are likely to be benefiting from a dozen such prehistoric inventions. Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can be almost certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered ‘white’ if she tried to immigrate to a European country today; and we definitely know her achievement continues to enrich the lives of billions of people. What we also know is that such discoveries were, again, based on centuries of accumulated knowledge and experimentation – recall how the basic principles of agriculture were known long before anyone applied them systematically – and that the results of such experiments were often preserved and transmitted through ritual, games and forms of play (or even more, perhaps, at the point where ritual, games and play shade into each other).
每当我们坐下来吃早餐的时候,我们都可能从一打这样的史前发明中受益。谁是第一个发现可以通过添加我们称之为酵母的微生物使面包膨胀的人?我们不知道,但我们几乎可以肯定她是一位女性,如果她今天试图移民到欧洲国家,很可能不会被认为是 “白人”;而且我们肯定知道她的成就继续丰富了数十亿人的生活。我们还知道的是,这种发现同样是基于几个世纪的知识积累和实验 —— 回顾一下农业的基本原则是如何在任何人系统地应用它们之前就已经知道了 —— 而且这种实验的结果往往是通过仪式、游戏和游戏形式(或者更多,也许是在仪式、游戏和游戏相互掩盖的地方)保存和传播的。
‘Gardens of Adonis’ are a fitting symbol here. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks.
“阿多尼斯的花园” 是这里的一个合适的象征。关于后来成为主食作物的营养特性和生长周期的知识,养活了大量的人口 —— 小麦、水稻、玉米 —— 最初正是通过这种仪式性的耕作来维持的。这种发现模式也不限于农作物。早在新石器时代之前,人们就已经发明了陶瓷,用来制作小雕像、动物和其他物体的微型模型,后来才发明了烹饪和储存器皿。采矿最早被证明是获取矿物作为颜料的一种方式,而为工业用途提取金属则是更晚的事。中美洲社会从未使用过轮式运输工具;但我们知道他们熟悉辐条、车轮和车轴,因为他们为儿童制作了玩具版本。希腊科学家提出了著名的蒸汽机原理,但只是将其用于制造寺庙的门,这些门似乎会自动打开,或类似的戏剧性幻觉。中国科学家也同样有名,他们首先将火药用于烟火。
For most of history, then, the zone of ritual play constituted both a scientific laboratory and, for any given society, a repertory of knowledge and techniques which might or might not be applied to pragmatic problems. Recall, for example, the ‘Little Old Men’ of the Osage and how they combined research and speculation on the principles of nature with the management and periodic reform of their constitutional order; how they saw these as ultimately the same project and kept careful (oral) records of their deliberations. Did the Neolithic town of Çatalhöyük or the Tripolye mega-sites host similar colleges of ‘Little Old Women’? We cannot know for certain, but it strikes us as quite likely, given the shared rhythms of social and technical innovation that we observe in each case and the attention to female themes in their art and ritual. If we are trying to frame more interesting questions to ask of history, this might be one: is there a positive correlation between what is usually called ‘gender equality’ (which might better be termed, simply, ‘women’s freedom’) and the degree of innovation in a given society?
那么,在历史上的大部分时间里,仪式游戏区既是一个科学实验室,对于任何特定的社会来说,也是一个知识和技术的宝库,可以或不可以应用于实际问题。例如,回顾一下奥萨奇人的 “小老头”,以及他们如何将对自然原理的研究和猜测与对其宪法秩序的管理和定期改革结合起来;他们如何将这些视为最终的同一项目,并对其讨论进行仔细的(口头)记录。新石器时代的恰塔霍裕克(Çatalhöyük)镇或特里波利耶(Tripolye)巨型遗址是否有类似的 “小老太太” 学院?我们无法确定,但考虑到我们在每个案例中观察到的社会和技术创新的共同节奏,以及在他们的艺术和仪式中对女性主题的关注,这让我们感到很有可能。如果我们试图对历史提出更多有趣的问题,这可能是一个问题:在通常被称为 “性别平等”(可能更适合称为 “妇女自由”)和一个特定社会的创新程度之间是否存在正相关关系?
Choosing to describe history the other way round, as a series of abrupt technological revolutions, each followed by long periods when we were prisoners of our own creations, has consequences. Ultimately it is a way of representing our species as decidedly less thoughtful, less creative, less free than we actually turn out to have been. It means not describing history as a continual series of new ideas and innovations, technical or otherwise, during which different communities made collective decisions about which technologies they saw fit to apply to everyday purposes, and which to keep confined to the domain of experimentation or ritual play. What is true of technological creativity is, of course, even more true of social creativity. One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book – indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us – was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation – even, in some ways, as an encyclopaedia of social possibilities.
选择反过来描述历史,作为一系列突如其来的技术革命,每个革命之后都有很长一段时间是我们自己创造的囚犯,是有后果的。归根结底,这是将我们这个物种描述为明显地不那么有思想、不那么有创造力、不那么自由的一种方式,而实际上我们已经变成了这样。这意味着不要把历史描述成一系列持续的新想法和创新,不管是技术上的还是其他方面的,在这期间,不同的社区就他们认为适合应用于日常用途的技术做出集体决定,而把哪些技术限制在实验或仪式游戏的领域。当然,技术创造力的真实情况对于社会创造力来说甚至更为真实。我们在研究本书时发现的最引人注目的模式之一 —— 事实上,对我们来说最像一个真正的突破的模式之一 —— 是在人类历史上,仪式游戏区如何一次又一次地作为社会实验的场所 —— 甚至在某些方面,作为社会可能性的百科全书。
We are not the first to suggest this. In the mid twentieth century, a British anthropologist named A. M. Hocart proposed that monarchy and institutions of government were originally derived from rituals designed to channel powers of life from the cosmos into human society. He even suggested at one point that ‘the first kings must have been dead kings’,2 and that individuals so honoured only really became sacred rulers at their funerals. Hocart was considered an oddball by his fellow anthropologists and never managed to secure a permanent job at a major university. Many accused him of being unscientific, just engaging in idle speculation. Ironically, as we’ve seen, it is the results of contemporary archaeological science that now oblige us to start taking his speculations seriously. To the astonishment of many, but much as Hocart predicted, the Upper Palaeolithic really has produced evidence of grand burials, carefully staged for individuals who indeed seem to have attracted spectacular riches and honours, largely in death.
我们并不是第一个提出这种观点的人。在二十世纪中期,一位名叫 A·M. Hocart 的英国人类学家提出,君主制和政府机构最初来自于仪式,旨在将生命的力量从宇宙引向人类社会。他甚至一度提出,“第一个国王一定是死去的国王”。2而如此受人尊敬的个人只有在他们的葬礼上才能真正成为神圣的统治者。霍卡特被他的人类学家同行认为是个怪人,而且从未设法在一所主要大学获得一份长期工作。许多人指责他是不科学的,只是在进行空洞的猜测。具有讽刺意味的是,正如我们所看到的,现在正是当代考古科学的成果让我们不得不开始认真对待他的猜测。令许多人感到惊讶的是,但正如霍卡特所预言的那样,旧石器时代上部确实产生了大墓葬的证据,为那些似乎确实吸引了惊人的财富和荣誉的个人精心安排的大墓葬,主要是在死亡时。
The principle doesn’t just apply to monarchy or aristocracy, but to other institutions as well. We have made the case that private property first appears as a concept in sacred contexts, as do police functions and powers of command, along with (in later times) a whole panoply of formal democratic procedures, like election and sortition, which were eventually deployed to limit such powers.
该原则不仅适用于君主制或贵族制,而且也适用于其他机构。我们已经说明,私有财产首先作为一个概念出现在神圣的背景下,警察职能和指挥权也是如此,还有(在后来的时代)一整套正式的民主程序,如选举和分类,最终被用来限制这些权力。
Here is where things get complicated. To say that, for most of human history, the ritual year served as a kind of compendium of social possibilities (as it did in the European Middle Ages, for instance, when hierarchical pageants alternated with rambunctious carnivals), doesn’t really do the matter justice. This is because festivals are already seen as extraordinary, somewhat unreal, or at the very least as departures from the everyday order. Whereas, in fact, the evidence we have from Palaeolithic times onwards suggests that many – perhaps even most – people did not merely imagine or enact different social orders at different times of year, but actually lived in them for extended periods of time. The contrast with our present situation could not be more stark. Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like. Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them.
这里是事情变得复杂的地方。说在人类历史的大部分时间里,仪式年作为一种社会可能性的汇编(例如在欧洲中世纪,当等级制度的盛会与狂欢的嘉年华会交替进行时,它就是这样做的),并没有真正公正地处理这件事。这是因为节日已经被视为非同寻常,有点不真实,或者至少是对日常秩序的背离。而事实上,从旧石器时代开始,我们拥有的证据表明,许多 —— 也许甚至是大多数 —— 人并不仅仅是在一年的不同时间想象或制定不同的社会秩序,而是实际上长期生活在其中。与我们现在的情况形成鲜明的对比是再好不过了。如今,我们大多数人甚至越来越难以想象另一种经济或社会秩序会是什么样子。相比之下,我们遥远的祖先似乎经常在它们之间来回移动。
If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history. Even those few anthropologists, such as Pierre Clastres and later Christopher Boehm, who argue that humans were always able to imagine alternative social possibilities, conclude – rather oddly – that for roughly 95 per cent of our species’ history those same humans recoiled in horror from all possible social worlds but one: the small-scale society of equals. Our only dreams were nightmares: terrible visions of hierarchy, domination and the state. In fact, as we’ve seen, this is clearly not the case.
如果人类历史上确实出了大问题 —— 考虑到世界的现状,很难否认确实出了问题 —— 那么也许正是在人们开始失去想象和制定其他社会存在形式的自由时开始出问题,以至于现在有些人觉得这种特殊类型的自由在人类历史的大部分时间里几乎不存在,或者几乎没有行使过。即使那些少数人类学家,如皮埃尔·克拉斯特尔和后来的克里斯托弗·波姆,认为人类总是能够想象其他的社会可能性,他们的结论是 —— 相当奇怪 —— 在我们这个物种历史的大约 95% 的时间里,同样的人类对所有可能的社会世界都感到恐惧,除了一个:平等的小规模社会。我们唯一的梦想是噩梦:关于等级制度、统治和国家的可怕愿景。事实上,正如我们所看到的,情况显然不是这样的。
The example of Eastern Woodlands societies in North America, explored in our last chapter, suggests a more useful way to frame the problem. We might ask why, for example, it proved possible for their ancestors to turn their backs on the legacy of Cahokia, with its overweening lords and priests, and to reorganize themselves into free republics; yet when their French interlocutors effectively tried to follow suit and rid themselves of their own ancient hierarchies, the result seemed so disastrous. No doubt there are quite a number of reasons. But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’).3 Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
我们在上一章中所探讨的北美东部林地社会的例子,提出了一个更有用的方法来框定问题。我们可能会问,例如,为什么他们的祖先有可能背弃卡霍基亚的遗产,及其凌厉的领主和牧师,并将自己重组为自由的共和国;然而,当他们的法国对话者有效地试图效仿并摆脱他们自己的古老等级制度时,结果似乎是如此的灾难性。毫无疑问,有相当多的原因。但对我们来说,要记住的关键点是,我们在这里谈论的 “自由” 并不是一个抽象的理想或正式的原则(如 “自由、平等和博爱!”)。3在这些章节中,我们谈论的是社会自由的基本形式,人们可以将其付诸实践。(1)离开或重新安置周围环境的自由;(2)无视或不服从他人命令的自由;以及(3)塑造全新的社会现实,或在不同的社会现实之间来回转换的自由。
What we can now see is that the first two freedoms – to relocate, and to disobey commands – often acted as a kind of scaffolding for the third, more creative one. Let us clarify some of the ways in which this ‘propping-up’ of the third freedom actually worked. As long as the first two freedoms were taken for granted, as they were in many North American societies when Europeans first encountered them, the only kings that could exist were always, in the last resort, play kings. If they overstepped the line, their erstwhile subjects could always ignore them or move someplace else. The same would go for any other hierarchy of offices or system of authority. Similarly, a police force that operated for only three months of the year, and whose membership rotated annually, was in a certain sense a play police force – which makes it slightly less bizarre that their members were sometimes recruited directly from the ranks of ritual clowns.4
我们现在可以看到,前两种自由 —— 重新安置和不服从命令 —— 经常作为第三种更有创造性的自由的一种支架。让我们澄清这种 “支持” 第三种自由的一些实际运作方式。只要前两种自由被认为是理所当然的,就像欧洲人第一次遇到许多北美社会时那样,唯一能够存在的国王在最后关头总是扮演国王。如果他们超越了界限,他们以前的臣民总是可以忽视他们,或者搬到别的地方去。任何其他等级的办公室或权力系统也是如此。同样,一支每年只运作三个月的警察部队,其成员每年轮换,在某种意义上是一支游戏警察部队 —— 这使得他们的成员有时直接从祭祀小丑的队伍中招募的怪事稍稍减少。4
It’s clear that something about human societies really has changed here, and quite profoundly. The three basic freedoms have gradually receded, to the point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehend what it might be like to live in a social order based on them.
很明显,人类社会的某些方面在这里真的发生了变化,而且是相当深刻的变化。三种基本自由已经逐渐消退,以至于今天生活的大多数人几乎无法理解生活在基于这些自由的社会秩序中可能是什么样子。
How did it happen? How did we get stuck? And just how stuck are we really?
它是如何发生的?我们是如何被卡住的?而我们到底有多大的障碍?
‘There is no way out of the imagined order,’ writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens . ‘When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom’, he goes on, ‘we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.’5 As we saw in our first chapter, he is not alone in reaching this conclusion. Most people who write history on a grand scale seem to have decided that, as a species, we are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves. Harari, once again echoing Rousseau, seems to have captured the prevailing mood.
尤瓦尔·诺亚·哈拉里(Yuval Noah Harari)在他的《智人》(Sapiens)一书中写道:“没有办法摆脱想象中的秩序”。“当我们打破监狱的围墙,奔向自由时”,他继续说,“我们实际上是奔向一个更大的监狱的更宽敞的运动场。”5正如我们在第一章中所看到的,他并不是唯一得出这一结论的人。大多数写历史的人似乎都认为,作为一个物种,我们确实被困住了,而且确实无法逃离我们为自己制造的制度笼子。哈拉里再次呼应卢梭,似乎抓住了普遍的情绪。
We’ll come back to this point, but for now we want to think a bit further about this first question: how did it happen? To some degree this must remain a matter for speculation. Asking the right questions may eventually sharpen our understanding, but for now the material at our disposal, especially for the early phases of the process, is still too sparse and ambiguous to provide definitive answers. The most we can offer are some preliminary suggestions, or points of departure, based on the arguments presented in this book; and perhaps we can also begin to see more clearly where others since the time of Rousseau have been going wrong.
我们会回到这一点上,但现在我们想进一步思考这第一个问题:它是如何发生的?在某种程度上,这必须保持一个猜测的问题。提出正确的问题可能最终会使我们的理解更加清晰,但现在我们所掌握的材料,特别是关于这个过程的早期阶段的材料,仍然过于稀少和含糊,无法提供明确的答案。我们最多只能根据本书提出的论点提供一些初步的建议或出发点;也许我们还可以开始更清楚地看到自卢梭时代以来其他人的错误所在。
One important factor would seem to be the gradual division of human societies into what are sometimes referred to as ‘culture areas’; that is, the process by which neighbouring groups began defining themselves against each other and, typically, exaggerating their differences. Identity came to be seen as a value in itself, setting in motion processes of cultural schismogenesis. As we saw in the case of Californian foragers and their aristocratic neighbours on the Northwest Coast, such acts of cultural refusal could also be self-conscious acts of political contestation, marking the boundary (in this case) between societies where inter-group warfare, competitive feasting and household bondage were rejected – as in those parts of Aboriginal California closest to the Northwest Coast – and where they were accepted, even celebrated, as quintessential features of social life. Archaeologists, taking a longer view, see a proliferation of such regional culture areas, especially from the end of the last Ice Age on, but are often at a loss to explain why they emerged or what constitutes a boundary between them.
一个重要的因素似乎是人类社会逐渐被划分为有时被称为 “文化区”;也就是说,相邻的群体开始相互界定自己,并且通常夸大他们的差异。身份本身被看作是一种价值,从而启动了文化分裂的过程。正如我们在加利福尼亚觅食者和他们在西北海岸的贵族邻居的案例中所看到的,这种文化拒绝行为也可能是政治竞争的自觉行为,标志着群体间的战争、竞争性宴席和家庭奴役被拒绝的社会(在这种情况下)与它们被接受、甚至被庆祝为社会生活的典型特征的社会之间的界限(如加利福尼亚原住民中最接近西北海岸的地区)。考古学家从更长远的角度来看,看到了这种区域文化区的扩散,尤其是从上个冰河时代结束后开始的,但他们往往无法解释为什么它们会出现,或者什么构成了它们之间的界限。
Still, this appears to have been an epochal development. Recall, for example, how post-Ice Age hunter-gatherers, especially in coastal or woodland regions, were enjoying something of a Golden Age. There appear to have been all sorts of local experiments, reflected in a proliferation of opulent burials and monumental architecture, the social functions of which often remain enigmatic: from shell-built ‘amphitheatres’ along the Gulf of Mexico to the great storehouses of Sannai Maruyama in Jōmon Japan, or the so-called ‘Giants’ Churches’ of the Bothnian Sea. It is among such Mesolithic populations that we often find not just the multiplication of distinct culture areas, but also the first clear archaeological indications of communities divided into permanent ranks, sometimes accompanied by interpersonal violence, even warfare. In some cases this may already have meant the stratification of households into aristocrats, commoners and slaves. In others, quite different forms of hierarchy may have taken root. Some appear to have become, effectively, fixed in place.
不过,这似乎是一个划时代的发展。回顾一下,例如,冰河时代后的狩猎采集者,特别是在沿海或林地地区,是如何享受黄金时代的。当地似乎有各种试验,反映在大量的豪华墓葬和纪念性建筑上,其社会功能往往仍然是神秘的:从墨西哥湾一带的贝壳建造的 “圆形剧场” 到日本江门的三井丸山的大仓库,或波德尼亚海的所谓 “巨人教堂”。正是在这样的中石器时代的人群中,我们往往不仅发现独特的文化区域的繁殖,而且还发现了第一个明确的考古迹象,即社区划分为永久性的等级,有时还伴随着人际间的暴力,甚至战争。在某些情况下,这可能已经意味着将家庭分为贵族、平民和奴隶的分层。在其他情况下,相当不同形式的等级制度可能已经扎根。有些似乎已经有效地固定下来了。
The role of warfare warrants further discussion here, because violence is often the route by which forms of play take on more permanent features. For example, the kingdoms of the Natchez or Shilluk might have been largely theatrical affairs, their rulers unable to issue orders that would be obeyed even a mile or two away; but if someone was arbitrarily killed as part of a theatrical display, that person remained definitively dead even after the performance was over. It’s an almost absurdly obvious point to make, but it matters. Play kings cease to be play kings precisely when they start killing people; which perhaps also helps to explain the excesses of ritually sanctioned violence that so often ensued during transitions from one state to the other. The same is true of warfare. As Elaine Scarry points out, two communities might choose to resolve a dispute by partaking in a contest, and often they do; but the ultimate difference between war (or ‘contests of injuring’, as she puts it) and most other kinds of contest is that anyone killed or disfigured in a war remains so, even after the contest ends.6
战争的作用在这里值得进一步讨论,因为暴力常常是游戏形式具有更多永久性特征的途径。例如,Natchez 人或 Shilluk 人的王国可能在很大程度上是戏剧性的,他们的统治者无法发布即使在一两英里外也会服从的命令;但如果有人作为戏剧表演的一部分被任意杀害,即使在表演结束后,这个人仍然明确地死亡。这是一个几乎荒谬的明显的观点,但它很重要。当戏曲国王开始杀人时,他们就不再是戏曲国王了;这或许也有助于解释在从一个国家过渡到另一个国家的过程中经常出现的仪式性认可的暴力的过度行为。战争的情况也是如此。正如伊莱恩·斯卡利所指出的,两个社区可能会选择通过参加比赛来解决争端,而且他们经常这样做;但战争(或她所说的 “伤害的比赛”)和其他大多数类型的比赛之间的最终区别是,在战争中被杀死或毁容的人仍然如此,即使在比赛结束后。6
Still, we must be cautious. While human beings have always been capable of physically attacking one another (and it’s difficult to find examples of societies where no one ever attacks anyone else, under any circumstances), there’s no actual reason to assume that war has always existed. Technically, war refers not just to organized violence but to a kind of contest between two clearly demarcated sides. As Raymond Kelly has adroitly pointed out, it’s based on a logical principle that’s by no means natural or self-evident, which states that major violence involves two teams, and any member of one team treats all members of the other as equal targets. Kelly calls this the principle of ‘social substitutability’7 – that is, if a Hatfield kills a McCoy and the McCoys retaliate, it doesn’t have to be against the actual murderer; any Hatfield is fair game. In the same way, if there is a war between France and Germany, any French soldier can kill any German soldier, and vice versa. The murder of entire populations is simply taking this same logic one step further. There is nothing particularly primordial about such arrangements; certainly, there is no reason to believe they are in any sense hardwired into the human psyche. On the contrary, it’s almost invariably necessary to employ some combination of ritual, drugs and psychological techniques to convince people, even adolescent males, to kill and injure each other in such systematic yet indiscriminate ways.
尽管如此,我们还是必须谨慎行事。虽然人类总是能够互相攻击(而且很难找到在任何情况下都没有人攻击别人的社会的例子),但没有实际理由假设战争一直存在。从技术上讲,战争不仅仅是指有组织的暴力,而是指两种明确划分的双方之间的一种竞赛。正如雷蒙德·凯利巧妙地指出的那样,它基于一个绝非自然或不言而喻的逻辑原则,即主要的暴力涉及两个团队,一个团队的任何成员将另一个团队的所有成员视为平等的目标。凯利称这为 “社会可替代性” 原则7 —— 也就是说,如果一个哈特菲尔德人杀死了一个麦考伊人,而麦考伊人进行报复,不一定是针对真正的凶手;任何一个哈特菲尔德人都是公平的游戏。同样,如果法国和德国之间发生了战争,任何法国士兵都可以杀死任何德国士兵,反之亦然。谋杀整个人口只是把这个相同的逻辑再向前推进一步。这种安排没有什么特别原始的东西;当然,没有理由相信它们在任何意义上是人类心理的硬性规定。相反,几乎无一例外地需要采用某种仪式、药物和心理技术的组合来说服人们,甚至是青春期的男性,以这种系统而不分青红皂白的方式相互杀戮和伤害。
It would seem that for most of human history, no one saw much reason to do such things; or if they did, it was rare. Systematic studies of the Palaeolithic record offer little evidence of warfare in this specific sense.8 Moreover, since war was always something of a game, it’s not entirely surprising that it has manifested itself in sometimes more theatrical and sometimes more deadly variations. Ethnography provides plenty of examples of what could best be described as play war: either with non-deadly weapons or, more often, battles involving thousands on each side where the number of casualties after a day’s ‘fighting’ amount to perhaps two or three. Even in Homeric-style warfare, most participants were basically there as an audience while individual heroes taunted, jeered and occasionally threw javelins or shot arrows at one another, or engaged in duels. At the other extreme, as we’ve seen, there is an increasing amount of archaeological evidence for outright massacres, such as those that took place among Neolithic village dwellers in central Europe after the end of the last Ice Age.
似乎在人类历史的大部分时间里,没有人认为有什么理由要做这样的事情;或者即使有,也是很少的。对旧石器时代记录的系统研究几乎没有提供这种特定意义上的战争的证据。8此外,由于战争始终是一种游戏,它以有时更戏剧化、有时更致命的方式表现出来并不完全令人惊讶。民族志提供了大量可被描述为游戏战争的例子:要么使用非致命的武器,要么更常见的是每一方都有数千人参加的战斗,在一天的 “战斗” 之后,伤亡人数可能只有两到三人。即使在荷马史诗式的战争中,大多数参与者基本上都是作为观众存在的,而个别英雄则是嘲讽、嘲笑,偶尔也会向对方投掷标枪或射箭,或进行决斗。在另一个极端,正如我们所看到的,有越来越多的考古学证据证明了彻底的大屠杀,例如在上个冰河时代结束后在欧洲中部的新石器时代村庄居民中发生的屠杀。
What strikes us is just how uneven such evidence is. Periods of intense inter-group violence alternate with periods of peace, often lasting centuries, in which there is little or no evidence for destructive conflict of any kind. War did not become a constant of human life after the adoption of farming; indeed, long periods of time exist in which it appears to have been successfully abolished. Yet it had a stubborn tendency to reappear, if only many generations later. At this point another new question comes into focus. Was there a relationship between external warfare and the internal loss of freedoms that opened the way, first to systems of ranking and then later on to large-scale systems of domination, like those we discussed in the later chapters of this book: the first dynastic kingdoms and empires, such as those of the Maya, Shang or Inca? And if so, how direct was this correlation? One thing we’ve learned is that it’s a mistake to begin answering such questions by assuming that these ancient polities were simply archaic versions of our modern states.
令我们震惊的是,这种证据是如此不均衡。群体间激烈的暴力时期与和平时期交替出现,通常持续几个世纪,其中很少或没有任何证据表明存在任何形式的破坏性冲突。在采用农耕技术后,战争并没有成为人类生活的常态,;事实上,在很长一段时间里,战争似乎已经被成功地废除了。然而,它有一种顽固的趋势,即使只是在许多代之后才重新出现。在这一点上,另一个新问题成为焦点。在外部战争和内部自由的丧失之间是否存在着一种关系,它首先为等级制度开辟了道路,后来又为大规模的统治制度开辟了道路,就像我们在本书后面的章节中所讨论的那样:第一个王朝的王国和帝国,如玛雅、商或印加的王国?如果是这样,这种关联性有多直接?我们学到的一点是,在回答这类问题时,假设这些古代政体只是我们现代国家的古老版本,那是一个错误。
The state, as we know it today, results from a distinct combination of elements – sovereignty, bureaucracy and a competitive political field – which have entirely separate origins. In our thought experiment of two chapters ago, we showed how those elements map directly on to basic forms of social power which can operate at any scale of human interaction, from the family or household all the way up to the Roman Empire or the super-kingdom of Tawantinsuyu. Sovereignty, bureaucracy and politics are magnifications of elementary types of domination, grounded respectively in the use of violence, knowledge and charisma. Ancient political systems – especially those, such as the Olmec or Chavín de Huántar, that elude definition in terms of ‘chiefdoms’ and ‘states’ – can often be understood better in terms of how they developed one axis of social power to an extraordinary degree (e.g. charismatic political contests and spectacles in the Olmec case, or control of esoteric knowledge in Chavín). These are what we termed ‘first-order regimes’.
我们今天所知道的国家,是由主权、官僚机构和竞争性的政治领域等元素的独特组合而产生的,这些元素有着完全不同的起源。在我们两章前的思想实验中,我们展示了这些要素是如何直接映射到社会权力的基本形式上的,这些社会权力可以在人类互动的任何规模上运作,从家庭或住户一直到罗马帝国或吐蕃的超级国度。主权、官僚机构和政治是基本类型的统治的放大,分别以暴力、知识和魅力的使用为基础。古代的政治体系 —— 尤其是那些诸如奥尔梅克人或查韦恩·德·瓦恩塔尔人的政治体系,无法用 “酋长国” 和 “国家” 来定义 —— 往往可以从他们如何将社会权力的一个轴心发展到非同寻常的程度(例如奥尔梅克人的魅力政治竞赛和奇观,或查韦恩人对秘传知识的控制)来更好地理解。这些就是我们所称的 “一阶制度”。
Where two axes of power were developed and formalized into a single system of domination we can begin to talk of ‘second-order regimes’. The architects of Egypt’s Old Kingdom, for example, armed the principle of sovereignty with a bureaucracy and managed to extend it across a large territory. By contrast, the rulers of ancient Mesopotamian city-states made no direct claims to sovereignty, which for them resided properly in heaven. When they engaged in wars over land or irrigation systems, it was only as secondary agents of the gods. Instead they combined charismatic competition with a highly developed administrative order. The Classic Maya were different again, confining administrative activities largely to the monitoring of cosmic affairs, while basing their earthly power on a potent fusion of sovereignty and inter-dynastic politics.
在两个权力轴被发展并正式成为一个单一的统治体系的地方,我们可以开始谈论 “二阶政权”。例如,埃及旧王国的建筑师们用官僚机构来武装主权原则,并设法将其扩展到大片领土。相比之下,古代美索不达米亚城邦的统治者并没有直接要求主权,对他们来说,主权完全在天上。当他们参与土地或灌溉系统的战争时,只是作为诸神的次要代理人。相反,他们把富有魅力的竞争与高度发达的行政秩序结合起来。古典玛雅人又有所不同,他们把行政活动主要限制在对宇宙事务的监督上,而把他们的世俗权力建立在主权和王朝间政治的有力融合上。
Insofar as these and other polities commonly regarded as ‘early states’ (Shang China, for instance) really share any common features, they seem to lie in altogether different areas – which brings us back to the question of warfare, and the loss of freedoms within society. All of them deployed spectacular violence at the pinnacle of the system (whether that violence was conceived as a direct extension of royal sovereignty or carried out at the behest of divinities); and all to some degree modelled their centres of power – the court or palace – on the organization of patriarchal households. Is this merely a coincidence? On reflection, the same combination of features can be found in most later kingdoms or empires, such as the Han, Aztec or Roman. In each case there was a close connection between the patriarchal household and military might. But why exactly should this be the case?
就这些政体和其他通常被视为 “早期国家” 的政体(例如商代中国)的共同特征而言,它们似乎处于完全不同的领域 —— 这使我们回到了战争问题,以及社会中自由的丧失问题。所有这些国家都在制度的顶层部署了惊人的暴力(无论这种暴力是被视为皇家主权的直接延伸,还是在神灵的授意下进行的);而且在某种程度上,所有这些国家的权力中心 —— 宫廷或宫殿 —— 都是以宗法制家庭的组织为模式。这仅仅是一个巧合吗?仔细想想,同样的特征组合可以在大多数后来的王国或帝国中找到,如汉、阿兹特克或罗马。在每个案例中,宗法制家庭和军事力量之间都有密切的联系。但是,究竟为什么会出现这种情况呢?
The question has proved difficult to answer in all but superficial terms, partly because our own intellectual traditions oblige us to use what is, in effect, imperial language to do so; and the language already implies an explanation, even a justification, for much of what we are really trying to account for here. That is why, in the course of this book, we sometimes felt the need to develop our own, more neutral (dare we say scientific?) list of baseline human freedoms and forms of domination; because existing debates almost invariably begin with terms derived from Roman Law, and for a number of reasons this is problematic.
事实证明,这个问题除了表面上的回答外很难回答,部分原因是我们自己的知识传统迫使我们使用实际上是帝国的语言来这样做;而这种语言已经意味着对我们在这里真正试图解释的大部分内容的解释,甚至是一种理由。这就是为什么在本书的写作过程中,我们有时觉得有必要制定我们自己的、更中立的(我们敢说是科学的)人类自由和统治形式的基本清单;因为现有的辩论几乎无一例外地以源自罗马法的术语开始,而由于一些原因,这是有问题的。
The Roman Law conception of natural freedom is essentially based on the power of the individual (by implication, a male head of household) to dispose of his property as he sees fit. In Roman Law property isn’t even exactly a right, since rights are negotiated with others and involve mutual obligations; it’s simply power – the blunt reality that someone in possession of a thing can do anything he wants with it, except that which is limited ‘by force or law’. This formulation has some peculiarities that jurists have struggled with ever since, as it implies freedom is essentially a state of primordial exception to the legal order. It also implies that property is not a set of understandings between people over who gets to use or look after things, but rather a relation between a person and an object characterized by absolute power. What does it mean to say one has the natural right to do anything one wants with a hand grenade, say, except those things one isn’t allowed to do? Who would come up with such an odd formulation?
罗马法对自然自由的概念基本上是建立在个人(隐含的意思是男性户主)按他认为合适的方式处置其财产的权力之上。在罗马法中,财产甚至不完全是一种权利,因为权利是与他人协商的,涉及相互的义务;它只是一种权力 —— 直截了当的现实,即拥有一件东西的人可以用它做任何事情,除了 “武力或法律” 所限制的事情。这种提法有一些特殊性,法学家们至今仍在为之奋斗,因为它意味着自由在本质上是法律秩序的一种原始例外状态。它还意味着,财产不是人们之间关于谁可以使用或照顾东西的一套理解,而是一个人和一个物体之间以绝对权力为特征的关系。说一个人有天然的权利用手榴弹做任何事情,比如说,除了那些不允许做的事情,这是什么意思?谁会想出这样一个奇怪的表述?
An answer is suggested by the West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson, who points out that Roman Law conceptions of property (and hence of freedom) essentially trace back to slave law.9 The reason it is possible to imagine property as a relationship of domination between a person and a thing is because, in Roman Law, the power of the master rendered the slave a thing (res, meaning an object), not a person with social rights or legal obligations to anyone else. Property law, in turn, was largely about the complicated situations that might arise as a result. It is important to recall, for a moment, who these Roman jurists actually were that laid down the basis for our current legal order – our theories of justice, the language of contract and torts, the distinction of public and private and so forth. While they spent their public lives making sober judgments as magistrates, they lived their private lives in households where they not only had near-total authority over their wives, children and other dependants, but also had all their needs taken care of by dozens, perhaps hundreds of slaves.
西印度社会学家奥兰多·帕特森提出了一个答案,他指出,罗马法对财产(以及自由)的概念基本上可以追溯到奴隶法。9之所以可以把财产想象成人与物之间的支配关系,是因为在罗马法中,主人的权力使奴隶成为一种物(res,意为物品),而不是一个拥有社会权利或对其他任何人负有法律义务的人。反过来,财产法在很大程度上是关于因此而可能出现的复杂情况。重要的是,我们要暂时回忆一下,这些罗马法学家究竟是谁,他们为我们目前的法律秩序奠定了基础 —— 我们的正义理论、合同和侵权行为的语言、公共和私人的区别等等。当他们在公共生活中作为行政官做出清醒的判断时,他们在家庭中过着私人生活,在那里他们不仅对自己的妻子、孩子和其他受抚养人拥有近乎完全的权力,而且他们的所有需求都由几十个,也许是几百个奴隶来照顾。
Slaves trimmed their hair, carried their towels, fed their pets, repaired their sandals, played music at their dinner parties and instructed their children in history and maths. At the same time, in terms of legal theory these slaves were classified as captive foreigners who, conquered in battle, had forfeited rights of any kind. As a result, the Roman jurist was free to rape, torture, mutilate or kill any of them at any time and in any way he had a mind to, without the matter being considered anything other than a private affair. (Only under the reign of Tiberius were any restrictions imposed on what a master could do to a slave, and what this meant was simply that permission from a local magistrate had to be obtained before a slave could be ripped apart by wild animals; other forms of execution could still be imposed at the owner’s whim.) On the one hand, freedom and liberty were private affairs; on the other, private life was marked by the absolute power of the patriarch over conquered people who were considered his private property.10
奴隶为他们修剪头发,搬运毛巾,喂养宠物,修理凉鞋,在他们的晚宴上演奏音乐,指导他们的孩子学习历史和数学。同时,就法律理论而言,这些奴隶被归类为被俘的外国人,他们在战斗中被征服,丧失了任何形式的权利。因此,罗马法学家可以在任何时候以任何方式自由地强奸、折磨、残害或杀害他们中的任何一个人,而这件事除了被认为是一件私事外,不会被认为是其他事情。(只有在提比略统治时期,才对主人可以对奴隶做的事情施加任何限制,这意味着在用野兽撕咬奴隶之前,必须获得当地法官的许可;其他形式的处决仍然可以根据主人的意愿实施。)一方面,自由是私人事务;另一方面,私人生活的特点是族长对被征服者的绝对权力,这些人被视为他的私人财产。10
The fact that most Roman slaves were not prisoners of war, in the literal sense, doesn’t really make much difference here. What’s important is that their legal status was defined in those terms. What is both striking and revealing, for our present purposes, is how in Roman jurisprudence the logic of war – which dictates that enemies are interchangeable, and if they surrendered they could either be killed or rendered ‘socially dead’, sold as commodities – and, therefore, the potential for arbitrary violence was inserted into the most intimate sphere of social relations, including the relations of care that made domestic life possible. Thinking back to examples like the ‘capturing societies’ of Amazonia or the process by which dynastic power took root in ancient Egypt, we can begin to see how important that particular nexus of violence and care has been. Rome took the entanglement to new extremes, and its legacy still shapes our basic concepts of social structure.
从字面上看,大多数罗马奴隶不是战俘,这一事实在这里并没有什么区别。重要的是,他们的法律地位是以这些术语定义的。就我们目前的目的而言,令人震惊和具有启示意义的是,在罗马法学中,战争的逻辑 —— 它决定了敌人是可以互换的,如果他们投降,要么被杀死,要么变成 “社会死亡”,作为商品出售 —— 以及,因此,任意暴力的可能性被插入到社会关系的最亲密领域,包括使家庭生活成为可能的照顾关系。回想一下亚马逊的 “捕捉社会” 或古埃及王朝权力扎根的过程,我们可以开始看到暴力和照顾的特殊关系是多么重要。罗马将这种纠缠推向了新的极端,它的遗产仍然影响着我们对社会结构的基本概念。
Our very word ‘family’ shares a root with the Latin famulus, meaning ‘house slave’, via familia, which originally referred to everyone under the domestic authority of a single paterfamilias or male head of household. Domus, the Latin word for ‘household’, in turn gives us not only ‘domestic’ and ‘domesticated’ but dominium, which was the technical term for the emperor’s sovereignty as well as a citizen’s power over private property. Through that we arrive at (literally, ‘familiar’) notions of what it means to be ‘dominant’, to possess ‘dominion’ and to ‘dominate’. Let us follow this line of thought a little further.
我们的 “家庭” 一词与拉丁文的 famulus 共享一个词根,意思是 “家奴”,通过 familia,它最初指的是在一个单一的 paterfamilias 或男性户主的家庭权力下的所有人。拉丁语中 “家庭” 的 Domus,不仅为我们提供了 “家庭” 和 “驯化”,还提供了 dominium,这是皇帝主权和公民对私有财产权力的技术术语。通过这一点,我们得出了(字面意思是 “熟悉的”)“统治”、拥有 “统治权” 和 “支配权” 的概念。让我们沿着这条思路再往前走一点。
We’ve seen how, in various parts of the world, direct evidence of warfare and massacres – including the carrying-off of captives – can be detected long before the appearance of kingdoms or empires. Much harder to ascertain, for such early periods of history, is what happened to captive enemies: were they killed, incorporated or left suspended somewhere in between? As we learned from various Amerindian cases, things may not always be entirely clear-cut. There were often multiple possibilities. It’s instructive, in this context, to return one last time to the case of the Wendat in the age of Kandiaronk, since this was one society that seemed determined to avoid ambiguity in such matters.
我们已经看到,在世界不同地区,早在王国或帝国出现之前,就可以发现战争和屠杀的直接证据 —— 包括带走俘虏的行为。在这样的历史早期,更难确定的是被俘虏的敌人的下场:他们是被杀了,还是被收编了,还是在两者之间悬空?正如我们从各种美洲印第安人的案例中了解到的那样,事情并不总是一目了然。往往有多种可能性。在这种情况下,最后一次回到 Kandiaronk 时代的 Wendat 人的案例是很有启发的,因为这是一个似乎决心在这种问题上避免含糊的社会。
In certain ways Wendat, and Iroquoian societies in general around that time, were extraordinarily warlike. There appear to have been bloody rivalries fought out in many northern parts of the Eastern Woodlands even before European settlers began supplying indigenous factions with muskets, resulting in the ‘Beaver Wars’. The early Jesuits were often appalled by what they saw, but they also noted that the ostensible reasons for wars were entirely different from those they were used to. All Wendat wars were, in fact, ‘mourning wars’, carried out to assuage the grief felt by close relatives of someone who had been killed. Typically, a war party would strike against traditional enemies, bringing back a few scalps and a small number of prisoners. Captive women and children would be adopted. The fate of men was largely up to the mourners, particularly the women, and appeared to outsiders at least to be entirely arbitrary. If the mourners felt it appropriate a male captive might be given a name, even the name of the original victim. The captive enemy would henceforth become that other person and, after a few years’ trial period, be treated as a full member of society. If for any reason that did not happen, however, he suffered a very different fate. For a male warrior taken prisoner, the only alternative to full adoption into Wendat society was excruciating death by torture.
在某些方面,温达特人和当时的伊鲁瓦克人社会一般都非常好战。甚至在欧洲定居者开始向原住民派别提供火枪之前,东部林地的许多北部地区似乎就已经出现了血腥的争斗,导致了 “海狸战争”。早期的耶稣会士往往对他们所看到的一切感到震惊,但他们也注意到,战争的表面原因与他们所习惯的完全不同。事实上,所有温达特人的战争都是 “哀悼战争”,是为了减轻被杀者近亲的悲痛而进行的。通常情况下,一支战争队伍会对传统的敌人进行打击,带回一些头皮和少量的囚犯。被俘的妇女和儿童会被收养。男人的命运主要由哀悼者决定,特别是妇女,至少在外人看来是完全任意的。如果送葬者认为合适,可以给男性俘虏起一个名字,甚至是原来受害者的名字。被俘虏的敌人将从此成为另一个人,并在几年的试验期后,被当作社会的正式成员对待。然而,如果由于任何原因没有发生这种情况,他的命运就会非常不同。对于一个被俘的男性战士来说,除了被完全接纳到温达特社会之外,唯一的选择就是被折磨致死。
Jesuits found the details shocking and fascinating. What they observed, sometimes at first hand, was a slow, public and highly theatrical use of violence. True, they conceded, the Wendat torture of captives was no more cruel than the kind directed against enemies of the state back home in France. What seems to have really appalled them, however, was not so much the whipping, boiling, branding, cutting-up – even in some cases cooking and eating – of the enemy, so much as the fact that almost everyone in a Wendat village or town took part, even women and children. The suffering might go on for days, with the victim periodically resuscitated only to endure further ordeals, and it was very much a communal affair.11 The violence seems all the more extraordinary once we recall how these same Wendat societies refused to spank children, directly punish thieves or murderers, or take any measure against their own members that smacked of arbitrary authority. In virtually all other areas of social life they were renowned for solving their problems through calm and reasoned debate.
耶稣会士发现这些细节令人震惊和着迷。他们所观察到的,有时是第一手资料,是一种缓慢的、公开的、高度戏剧化的暴力使用。的确,他们承认,温达特人对俘虏的折磨并不比法国国内对国家敌人的折磨更残酷。然而,真正让他们感到震惊的不是对敌人的鞭打、煮沸、烙印、切割 —— 甚至在某些情况下烹饪和食用 —— 而是温达特村或镇上的几乎所有人都参与其中,甚至妇女和儿童。痛苦可能会持续数天,受害者会定期复活,以忍受更多的折磨,而且这在很大程度上是一个社区事件。11一旦我们回想起这些温达特人社会拒绝打孩子的屁股,拒绝直接惩罚小偷或杀人犯,或对自己的成员采取任何带有专制色彩的措施,这种暴力就显得更加特别。在社会生活的几乎所有其他领域,他们都以通过冷静和合理的辩论来解决问题而闻名。
Now, it would be easy to make an argument that repressed aggression must be vented in one way or another, so that orgies of communal torture are simply the necessary flipside of a non-violent community; and some contemporary scholars do make this point. But it doesn’t really work. In fact, Iroquoia seems to be precisely one of those regions of North America where violence flared up only during certain specific historical periods and then largely disappeared in others. In what archaeologists term the ‘Middle Woodland’ phase, for instance, between 100 BC and AD 500 – corresponding roughly to the heyday of the Hopewell civilization – there seems to have been general peace.12 Later on, signs of endemic warfare reappear. Clearly, at some points in their history people living in this region found effective ways to ensure that vendettas didn’t escalate into a spiral of retaliation or actual warfare (the Haudenosaunee story of the Great Law of the Peace seems to be about precisely such a moment); at other times, the system broke down and the possibility of sadistic cruelty returned.
现在,很容易提出这样的论点:被压抑的侵略性必须以这样或那样的方式发泄出来,所以社区酷刑的狂欢只是非暴力社区的必要反面;而且一些当代学者确实提出了这个观点。但这并没有真正发挥作用。事实上,Iroquoia 似乎正是北美那些暴力只在某些特定历史时期爆发而在其他时期基本消失的地区之一。例如,在考古学家所称的 “中林地” 阶段,即公元前 100 年到公元 500 年之间 —— 大致相当于霍普韦尔文明的全盛时期 —— 似乎普遍存在和平。12后来,地方性战争的迹象又出现了。显然,在历史上的某些时候,生活在这个地区的人们找到了有效的方法来确保仇杀不会升级为螺旋式的报复或实际的战争(Haudenosaunee 的和平大法的故事似乎正是关于这样一个时刻);在其他时候,这个系统崩溃了,虐待性的残酷行为的可能性又出现了。
What, then, was the meaning of these theatres of violence? One way to approach the question is to compare them with what was happening in Europe around the same time. As the Quebecois historian Denys Delâge points out, Wendat who visited France were equally appalled by the tortures exhibited during public punishments and executions, but what struck them as most remarkable is that ‘the French whipped, hanged, and put to death men from among themselves ’, rather than external enemies. The point is telling, as in seventeenth-century Europe, Delâge notes,
那么,这些暴力舞台的意义是什么?处理这个问题的一个方法是将它们与同一时期在欧洲发生的事情进行比较。正如魁北克历史学家 Denys Delâge 指出的那样,访问法国的温达特人同样对公共惩罚和处决期间所展示的酷刑感到震惊,但让他们感到最了不起的是,“法国人鞭打、绞死自己人,而不是外部敌人。” 这一点很有说服力,因为在 17 世纪的欧洲,德拉吉指出,
… almost all punishment, including the death penalty, involved severe physical suffering: wearing an iron collar, being whipped, having a hand cut off, or being branded … It was a ritual that manifested power in a conspicuous way, thereby revealing the existence of an internal war. The sovereign incarnated a superior power that transcended his subjects, one that they were compelled to recognise … While Amerindian cannibal rituals showed the desire to take over the strength and courage of the alien so as to combat him better, the European ritual revealed the existence of a dissymmetry, an irrevocable imbalance of power.13
…… 几乎所有的惩罚,包括死刑,都涉及到严重的肉体痛苦:戴上铁项圈,被鞭打,被砍掉一只手,或者被打上烙印…… 这是一种以明显的方式体现权力的仪式,从而揭示了内部战争的存在。君主化身为一种超越臣民的优越力量,臣民不得不承认这种力量…… 美洲印第安人的食人仪式表明,他们希望夺取外星人的力量和勇气,以便更好地与之斗争,而欧洲的仪式则揭示了不对称的存在,一种不可逆转的权力失衡。13
Wendat punitive actions against war captives (those not taken in for adoption) required the community to become a single body, unified by its capacity for violence. In France, by contrast, ‘the people’ were unified as potential victims of the king’s violence. But the contrasts run deeper still.
温达特人对战俘(那些没有被收养的战俘)的惩罚行动要求社区成为一个单一的团体,通过其暴力能力来统一。相反,在法国,“人民” 被统一为国王暴力的潜在受害者。但是,这种反差还更深。
As a Wendat traveller observed of the French system, anyone – guilty or innocent – might end up being made a public example. Among the Wendat themselves, however, violence was firmly excluded from the realm of family and household. A captive warrior might either be treated with loving care and affection or be the object of the worst treatment imaginable. No middle ground existed. Prisoner sacrifice was not merely about reinforcing the solidarity of the group but also proclaimed the internal sanctity of the family and the domestic realm as spaces of female governance where violence, politics and rule by command did not belong. Wendat households, in other words, were defined in exactly opposite terms to the Roman familia .
正如一位温达特人旅行者对法国制度的观察,任何人 —— 无论有罪还是无罪 —— 都可能成为公众的榜样。然而,在温达特人自己中间,暴力被坚决排除在家庭和家族领域之外。被俘虏的战士要么受到关爱,要么成为可以想象的最糟糕的待遇的对象。没有中间地带存在。牺牲俘虏不仅仅是为了加强群体的团结,而且还宣告了家庭和家庭领域的内部神圣性,是女性治理的空间,暴力、政治和命令式的统治都不属于这里。换句话说,温达特家庭的定义与罗马家庭完全相反。
In this particular respect, French society under the Ancien Régime presents a rather similar picture to imperial Rome – at least, when both are placed in the light of the Wendat example. In both cases, household and kingdom shared a common model of subordination. Each was made in the other’s image, with the patriarchal family serving as a template for the absolute power of kings, and vice versa.14 Children were to be submissive to their parents, wives to husbands, and subjects to rulers whose authority came from God. In each case the superior party was expected to inflict stern chastisement when he considered it appropriate: that is, to exercise violence with impunity. All this, moreover, was assumed to be bound up with feelings of love and affection. Ultimately, the house of the Bourbon monarchs – like the palace of an Egyptian pharaoh, Roman emperor, Aztec tlatoani or Sapa Inca – was not merely a structure of domination but also one of care, where a small army of courtiers laboured night and day to attend to the king’s every physical need and prevent him, as much as was humanly possible, from ever feeling anything but divine.
在这一特定方面,旧制度下的法国社会呈现出与帝国罗马相当相似的景象 —— 至少,当两者都被置于温达特人的例子中时。在这两种情况下,家庭和王国都有一个共同的从属模式。每一个都是按照对方的形象制造的,父权制家庭是国王绝对权力的模板,反之亦然。14孩子要顺从父母,妻子要顺从丈夫,臣民要顺从统治者,而统治者的权力来自于上帝。在每一种情况下,上级都要在他认为适当的时候给予严厉的责罚:也就是说,可以不受惩罚地行使暴力。此外,所有这一切都被认为是与爱和感情相联系的。最终,波旁王朝君主的宫殿 —— 就像埃及法老、罗马皇帝、阿兹特克人的特拉托尼或萨帕印加人的宫殿一样 —— 不仅是一个统治结构,也是一个关怀结构,在这里,一小群朝臣夜以继日地照顾国王的每一个身体需求,并尽可能地防止他产生神圣感。
In all these cases, the bonds of violence and care extended downwards as well as upwards. We can do no better than put it in words made famous by King James I of England in The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598):
在所有这些情况下,暴力和关怀的束缚既向下也向上延伸。我们只能用英国国王詹姆斯一世在《自由君主国的真正法律》(1598 年)中的名言来形容它。
As the father, of his fatherly duty, is to care for the nourishing, education, and virtuous government of his children; even so is the King bound to care for all his subjects … As the father’s wrath and correction on any of his children that offendeth, ought to be a fatherly chastisement seasoned with pity, so long as there is any hope of amendment in them; so ought the King towards any of his lieges that offend in that measure … As the father’s chief joy ought to be in procuring his children’s welfare, rejoicing in their weal, sorrowing and pitying at their evil, to hazard for their safety … so ought a good Prince think of his People.
正如父亲的职责是关心子女的成长、教育和良性管理一样,国王也必须关心他的所有臣民…… 正如父亲对任何犯错的子女的愤怒和纠正,只要他们还有改正的希望,就应该是父亲的责罚,加上怜悯;国王对任何犯错的臣民也应该如此。正如父亲的主要快乐应该是为他的孩子谋求福利,为他们的幸福而高兴,为他们的罪恶而悲伤和怜悯,为他们的安全而担忧…… 一个好的王子也应该为他的人民着想。
Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love. Wendat torture, in the same period of history, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to make clear that no form of physical chastisement should ever be countenanced inside a community or household. Violence and care, in the Wendat case, were to be entirely separated. Seen in this light, the distinctive features of Wendat prisoner torture come into focus.
在十七世纪的欧洲,公开的酷刑创造了灼热的、令人难忘的痛苦和折磨的场面,以传达这样的信息:一个丈夫可以虐待妻子、父母可以殴打孩子的制度,最终是一种爱的形式。在同一历史时期,温达特人的酷刑创造了灼热的、令人难忘的痛苦和折磨的场面,以表明在一个社区或家庭中不应该容忍任何形式的身体责罚。在温达特人的案例中,暴力和照顾是完全分开的。从这个角度来看,温达特囚犯酷刑的独特特征就会成为焦点。
It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps, confusion – between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.
在我们看来,照顾和支配之间的这种联系 —— 或者更好的说法是混淆 —— 对于我们如何通过重新创造我们彼此之间的关系而失去自由地重新创造自己的能力这一更大的问题来说是完全关键的。它对于理解我们是如何被困住的,以及为什么这些天我们几乎无法设想我们自己的过去或未来是什么,而只是从更小的笼子过渡到更大的笼子。
In the course of writing this book, we have tried to strike a certain balance. It would be intuitive for an archaeologist and an anthropologist, immersed in our subject matter, to take on all the scholarly views about, say, Stonehenge, the ‘Uruk expansion’ or Iroquoian social organization and explain our preference for one interpretation over another, or venture a different one. This is how the search for truth is normally conducted in the academy. But had we tried to outline or refute every existing interpretation of the material we covered, this book would have been two or three times the size, and likely would have left the reader with a sense that the authors are engaged in a constant battle with demons who were in fact two inches tall. So instead we have tried to map out what we think really happened, and to point out the flaws in other scholars’ arguments only insofar as they seemed to reflect more widespread misconceptions.
在写这本书的过程中,我们试图取得某种平衡。对于一个考古学家和人类学家来说,沉浸在我们的主题中,接受所有关于巨石阵、“乌鲁克扩张” 或伊鲁克社会组织的学术观点,并解释我们对一种解释的偏爱,或冒险提出不同的解释,是很直观的。这就是学术界对真理的探索,通常是这样进行的。但是,如果我们试图概述或驳斥我们所涉及的材料的每一种现有解释,这本,就会有两三倍的篇幅,而且很可能会给读者留下一种感觉,即作者在与实际上只有两英寸高的恶魔进行不断的斗争。因此,我们试图描绘出我们认为真正发生的事情,并指出其他学者论点中的缺陷,只要它们似乎反映了更普遍的误解。
Perhaps the most stubborn misconception we’ve been tackling has to do with scale. It does seem to be received wisdom in many quarters, academic and otherwise, that structures of domination are the inevitable result of populations scaling up by orders of magnitude; that is, that a necessary correspondence exists between social and spatial hierarchies. Time and again we found ourselves confronted with writing which simply assumes that the larger and more densely populated the social group, the more ‘complex’ the system needed to keep it organized. Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy. Hierarchy, in turn, is used as a euphemism for chains of command (the ‘origins of the state’), which mean that as soon as large numbers of people decided to live in one place or join a common project, they must necessarily abandon the second freedom – to refuse orders – and replace it with legal mechanisms for, say, beating or locking up those who don’t do as they’re told.
也许我们一直在解决的最顽固的错误观念与规模有关。在许多地方,不管是学术界还是其他方面,统治结构是人口数量级增加的必然结果;也就是说,社会和空间等级之间存在着必然的对应关系,这似乎是公认的智慧。我们一次又一次地发现,我们面对的写作只是假设社会群体越大、人口越密集,保持其组织的系统就越 “复杂”。反过来,复杂性仍然经常被用作等级制度的同义词。等级制度又被用作指挥链的委婉说法(“国家的起源”),这意味着一旦大量的人决定生活在一个地方或加入一个共同的项目,他们就必须放弃第二种自由 —— 拒绝命令 —— 而代之以法律机制,例如,殴打或监禁那些不听话的人。
As we’ve seen, none of these assumptions are theoretically essential, and history tends not to bear them out. Carole Crumley, an anthropologist and expert on Iron Age Europe, has been pointing this out for years: complex systems don’t have to be organized top-down, either in the natural or in the social world. That we tend to assume otherwise probably tells us more about ourselves than the people or phenomena that we’re studying.15 Neither is she alone in making this point. But more often than not, such observations have fallen on deaf ears.
正如我们所看到的,这些假设在理论上都不是必不可少的,而且历史往往不能证明它们。人类学家和铁器时代欧洲专家卡罗尔·克鲁姆利(Carole Crumley)多年来一直指出:“无论是在自然界还是在社会世界,复杂的系统不一定是自上而下组织的。” 我们倾向于假设其他情况,这可能告诉我们更多关于我们自己而不是我们正在研究的人或现象。15她也不是唯一提出这个观点的人。但更多的时候,这样的观察是被置若罔闻的。
It’s probably time to start listening, because ‘exceptions’ are fast beginning to outnumber the rules. Take cities. It was once assumed that the rise of urban life marked some kind of historical turnstile, whereby everyone who passed through had to permanently surrender their basic freedoms and submit to the rule of faceless administrators, stern priests, paternalistic kings or warrior-politicians – simply to avert chaos (or cognitive overload). To view human history through such a lens today is really not all that different from taking on the mantle of a modern-day King James, since the overall effect is to portray the violence and inequalities of modern society as somehow arising naturally from structures of rational management and paternalistic care: structures designed for human populations who, we are asked to believe, became suddenly incapable of organizing themselves once their numbers expanded above a certain threshold.
现在可能是时候开始倾听了,因为 “例外” 正迅速开始超过规则的数量。以城市为例。人们曾经认为,城市生活的兴起标志着某种历史性的转折,每个经过的人都必须永久地放弃他们的基本自由,服从于不露面的管理者、严厉的牧师、家长式的国王或战士式的政治家的统治 —— 只是为了避免混乱(或认知过载)。今天,通过这样的镜头来看待人类历史,其实与披上现代詹姆士国王的外衣没有什么区别,因为总体效果是将现代社会的暴力和不平等描绘成某种程度上自然产生于理性管理和家长式关怀的结构:这些结构是为人类人口设计的,我们被要求相信,一旦他们的数量扩大到一定程度,他们就突然没有能力组织起来。
Not only do such views lack a sound basis in human psychology. They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. We do not possess an adequate terminology for these early cities. To call them ‘egalitarian’, as we’ve seen, could mean quite a number of different things. It might imply an urban parliament and co-ordinated projects of social housing, as with some pre-Columbian centres in the Americas; or the self-organizing of autonomous households into neighbourhoods and citizens’ assemblies, as with prehistoric mega-sites north of the Black Sea; or, perhaps, the introduction of some explicit notion of equality based on principles of uniformity and sameness, as in Uruk-period Mesopotamia.
这种观点不仅缺乏人类心理学的合理依据。它们也很难与世界上许多地方的城市实际上是如何开始的考古学证据相协调:作为大规模的公民实验,它们经常缺乏预期的行政等级和专制统治的特征。对于这些早期的城市,我们并不拥有一个适当的术语。正如我们所看到的,称它们为 “平等主义”,可能意味着相当多的不同事情。它可能意味着城市议会和社会住房的协调项目,如美洲的一些前哥伦布中心;或自治家庭自我组织成邻里和公民大会,如黑海以北的史前大遗址;或者,也许,引入一些基于统一性和同一性原则的明确的平等概念,如乌鲁克时期的美索不达米亚。
None of this variability is surprising once we recall what preceded cities in each region. That was not, in fact, rudimentary or isolated groups, but far-flung networks of societies, spanning diverse ecologies, with people, plants, animals, drugs, objects of value, songs and ideas moving between them in endlessly intricate ways. While the individual units were demographically small, especially at certain times of year, they were typically organized into loose coalitions or confederacies. At the very least, these were simply the logical outcome of our first freedom: to move away from one’s home, knowing one will be received and cared for, even valued, in some distant place. At most they were examples of ‘amphictyony’, in which some kind of formal organization was put in charge of the care and maintenance of sacred places. It seems that Marcel Mauss had a point when he argued that we should reserve the term ‘civilization’ for great hospitality zones such as these. Of course, we are used to thinking of ‘civilization’ as something that originates in cities – but, armed with new knowledge, it seems more realistic to put things the other way round and to imagine the first cities as one of those great regional confederacies, compressed into a small space.
一旦我们回忆起每个地区的城市之前的情况,这种变异性并不令人惊讶。事实上,那不是原始的或孤立的群体,而是遥远的社会网络,跨越不同的生态环境,人、植物、动物、毒品、有价值的物品、歌曲和思想以无尽的复杂方式在它们之间流动。虽然单个单位在人口上是小的,特别是在一年中的某些时候,他们通常被组织成松散的联盟或同盟。至少,这些只是我们第一种自由的逻辑结果:离开自己的家,知道自己会在某个遥远的地方受到接待和照顾,甚至受到重视。它们最多只是 “两栖” 的例子,即由某种正式的组织来负责圣地的照料和维护。马塞尔·莫斯(Marcel Mauss)认为,我们应该将 “文明” 一词保留给像这样的伟大接待区,这似乎是有道理的。当然,我们习惯于把 “文明” 看作是起源于城市的东西 —— 但是,在新的知识的武装下,把事情反过来看,把第一批城市想象成那些伟大的区域联盟之一,压缩在一个小空间里,似乎更现实。
Of course, monarchy, warrior aristocracies or other forms of stratification could also take hold in urban contexts, and often did. When this happened the consequences were dramatic. Still, the mere existence of large human settlements in no way caused these phenomena, and certainly didn’t make them inevitable. For the origins of these structures of domination we must look elsewhere. Hereditary aristocracies were just as likely to exist among demographically small or modest-sized groups, such as the ‘heroic societies’ of the Anatolian highlands, which took form on the margins of the first Mesopotamian cities and traded extensively with them. Insofar as we have evidence for the inception of monarchy as a permanent institution it seems to lie precisely there, and not in cities. In other parts of the world, some urban populations ventured partway down the road towards monarchy, only to turn back. Such was the case at Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, where the city’s population – having raised the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon – then abandoned such aggrandizing projects and embarked instead on a prodigious programme of social housing, providing multi-family apartments for its residents.
当然,君主制、武士贵族制或其他形式的分层也可以在城市背景下形成,而且常常如此。当这种情况发生时,后果是戏剧性的。然而,仅仅是大型人类定居点的存在并没有造成这些现象,当然也没有使它们成为不可避免的。对于这些统治结构的起源,我们必须从其他地方寻找。世袭贵族制度同样可能存在于人口小规模或中等规模的群体中,如安纳托利亚高原的 “英雄社会”,它们在美索不达米亚第一批城市的边缘形成,并与它们进行广泛的贸易。只要我们有证据表明君主制作为一种永久性制度的开始,它似乎就在那里,而不是在城市。在世界其他地方,一些城市人口在通往君主制的道路上冒险走了一段路,但又回头了。墨西哥谷地的特奥蒂瓦坎就是这种情况,该城市的居民在建造了太阳和月亮金字塔之后,放弃了这种扩张性的项目,转而开始了一个巨大的社会住房计划,为居民提供多户公寓。
Elsewhere, early cities followed the opposite trajectory, starting with neighbourhood councils and popular assemblies and ending up being ruled by warlike dynasts, who then had to maintain an uneasy coexistence with older institutions of urban governance. Something along these lines took place in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, after the Uruk period: here again the convergence between systems of violence and systems of care seems critical. Sumerian temples had always organized their economic existence around the nurturing and feeding of the gods, embodied in their cult statues, which became surrounded by a whole industry and bureaucracy of welfare. Even more crucially, temples were charitable institutions. Widows, orphans, runaways, those exiled from their kin groups or other support networks would take refuge there: at Uruk, for example, in the Temple of Inanna, protective goddess of the city, overlooking the great courtyard of the city’s assembly.
在其他地方,早期城市遵循相反的轨迹,从居委会和人民大会开始,最后由好战的王朝统治,然后他们不得不与旧的城市管理机构保持不安的共存。在乌鲁克时期之后,美索不达米亚早期王朝也发生了类似的情况:在这里,暴力系统和照顾系统之间的融合似乎也很关键。苏美尔人的神庙总是围绕着对神灵的培养和供养来组织他们的经济存在,这些神灵体现在他们的崇拜雕像中,这些雕像被整个福利行业和官僚机构所包围。更关键的是,神庙是慈善机构。寡妇、孤儿、离家出走的人、被亲属团体或其他支持网络流放的人都会在那里避难:例如,在乌鲁克,在伊南娜神庙,保护城市的女神,俯瞰城市集会的大院子。
The first charismatic war-kings attached themselves to such spaces, quite literally moving in next door to the residence of the city’s leading deity. In such ways, Sumerian monarchs were able to insert themselves into institutional spaces once reserved for the care of the gods, and thus removed from the realm of ordinary human relationships. This makes sense because kings, as the Malagasy proverb puts it, ‘have no relatives’ – or they shouldn’t, since they are rulers equally of all their subjects. Slaves too have no kin; they are severed from all prior attachments. In either case, the only recognized social relationships such individuals possess are those based on power and domination. In structural terms, and as against almost everyone else in society, kings and slaves effectively inhabit the same ground. The difference lies in which end of the power spectrum they happen to occupy.
第一批有魅力的战争之王依附于这样的空间,实际上是搬到了城市主要神灵住所的隔壁。通过这种方式,苏美尔君主能够将自己插入曾经为神灵所保留的机构空间,从而脱离了普通人际关系的范畴。这是有道理的,因为正如马达加斯加的谚语所说,国王 ‘没有亲戚’ —— 或者说他们不应该有,因为他们是所有臣民的平等统治者。奴隶也没有亲属;他们被切断了所有先前的联系。在任何一种情况下,这些人拥有的唯一公认的社会关系是那些基于权力和统治的关系。从结构上看,相对于社会上的几乎所有人,国王和奴隶实际上居住在同一个地方。区别在于他们碰巧占据了权力光谱的哪一端。
We also know that needy individuals, taken into such temple institutions, were supplied with regular rations and put to work on the temple’s lands and in its workshops. The very first factories – or, at least, the very first we are aware of in history – were charitable institutions of this kind, where temple bureaucrats would supply women with wool to spin and weave, supervise the disposal of the product (much of it traded with upland groups in exchange for wood, stone and metal, unavailable in the river valleys), and provide them with carefully apportioned rations. All this was already true long before the appearance of kings. As persons dedicated to the gods, these women must originally have had a certain dignity, even a sacred status; but already by the time of the first written documents, the situation seems to have grown more complicated.
我们还知道,有需要的人被带入这样的寺庙机构,得到定期的口粮,并在寺庙的土地上和车间里工作。最早的工厂 —— 或者说,至少是我们在历史上所知道的最早的工厂 —— 就是这类慈善机构,寺庙的官僚会向妇女提供羊毛来纺纱和织布,监督产品的处理(其中大部分是与高地群体交易,以换取木材、石头和金属,在河谷中无法得到),并向她们提供精心分配的口粮。所有这些在国王出现之前就已经存在了。作为献给神的人,这些妇女最初肯定有一定的尊严,甚至是神圣的地位;但到了第一批书面文件的时候,情况似乎变得更加复杂。
By then, some of those working in Sumerian temples were also war captives, or even slaves, who were similarly bereft of family support. Over time, and perhaps as a result, the status of widows and orphans also appears to have been downgraded, until the temple institutions came to resemble something more like a Victorian poorhouse. How, we might then ask, did the degradation of women working in the temple factories affect the status of women more generally? If nothing else, it must have made the prospect of fleeing an abusive domestic arrangement far more daunting. Loss of the first freedom meant, increasingly, loss of the second. Loss of the second meant effacement of the third. If a woman in such a situation attempted to create a new cult, a new temple, a new vision of social relations she would instantly be marked as a subversive, a revolutionary; if she attracted followers she might well find herself confronted by military force.
那时,一些在苏美尔神庙工作的人也是战争俘虏,甚至是奴隶,他们也同样失去了家庭支持。随着时间的推移,也许是由于这个原因,寡妇和孤儿的地位似乎也被降低了,直到神庙机构变得更像维多利亚时代的救济院。那么,我们可能会问,在寺庙工厂工作的妇女的地位下降是如何影响到妇女的普遍地位的?如果没有其他原因,它肯定使逃离虐待性家庭安排的前景更加令人生畏。第一个自由的丧失越来越意味着第二个自由的丧失。失去第二种自由意味着第三种自由的消失。如果一名妇女在这种情况下试图创建一个新的,一个新的寺庙,一个新的社会关系愿景,她将立即被标记为颠覆者,一个革命者;如果她吸引了追随者,她很可能发现自己面临着军事力量的打击。
All this brings into focus another question. Does this newly established nexus between external violence and internal care – between the most impersonal and the most intimate of human relations – mark the point where everything begins to get confused? Is this an example of how relations that were once flexible and negotiable ended up getting fixed in place: an example, in other words, of how we effectively got stuck? If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?
所有这一切使人关注另一个问题。在外部暴力和内部关怀之间 —— 在最不近人情和最亲密的人类关系之间 —— 这种新建立的联系是否标志着一切都开始变得混乱?这是否是一个曾经灵活和可协商的关系最终被固定下来的例子:换句话说,是一个我们如何有效地被卡住的例子?如果有一个我们应该讲述的特别故事,一个我们应该对人类历史提出的大问题(而不是 “社会不平等的起源”),那正是:“我们是如何发现自己停留在一种社会现实的形式中,以及最终基于暴力和统治的关系是如何在其中被正常化的?”
Perhaps the scholar who most closely approached this question in the last century was an anthropologist and poet named Franz Steiner, who died in 1952. Steiner led a fascinating if tragic life. A brilliant polymath born to a Jewish family in Bohemia, he later lived with an Arab family in Jerusalem until expelled by the British authorities, conducted fieldwork in the Carpathians and was twice forced by the Nazis to flee the continent, ending his career – ironically enough – in the south of England. Most of his immediate family were killed at Birkenau. Legend has it that he completed 800 pages of a monumental doctoral dissertation on the comparative sociology of slavery, only to have the suitcase containing his drafts and research notes stolen on a train. He was friends with, and a romantic rival to, Elias Canetti, another Jewish exile at Oxford and a successful suitor to the novelist Iris Murdoch – although two days after she’d accepted his proposal of marriage, Steiner died of a heart attack. He was forty-three.
也许在上个世纪最接近这个问题的学者是一位名叫弗朗茨·斯坦纳的人类学家和诗人,他于 1952 年去世。斯坦纳过着迷人而又悲惨的生活。他是一位杰出的多面手,出生于波西米亚的一个犹太家庭,后来在耶路撒冷与一个阿拉伯家庭生活在一起,直到被英国当局驱逐,在喀尔巴阡山脉进行实地考察,并两次被纳粹强迫逃离欧洲大陆,在英国南部结束了他的职业生涯 —— 具有讽刺意味。他的大部分直系亲属在比克瑙被杀害。传说他完成了 800 页关于奴隶制的比较社会学的不朽博士论文,但装有他的草稿和研究笔记的手提箱在火车上被盗。他是埃利亚斯·卡内蒂的朋友,也是他的浪漫对手,埃利亚斯·卡内蒂是牛津大学的另一位犹太流亡者,也是小说家艾里斯·默多克的成功求婚者 —— 尽管在她接受他的求婚两天后,斯坦纳因心脏病发作而去世。他当时四十三岁。
The shorter version of Steiner’s doctoral work, which does survive, focuses on what he calls ‘pre-servile institutions’. Poignantly, given his own life story, it is a study of what happens in different cultural and historical situations to people who become unmoored: those expelled from their clans for some debt or fault; castaways, criminals, runaways. It can be read as a history of how refugees such as himself were first welcomed, treated as almost sacred beings, then gradually degraded and exploited, again much like the women working in the Sumerian temple factories. In essence, the story told by Steiner appears to be precisely about the collapse of what we would term the first basic freedom (to move away or relocate), and how this paved the way for the loss of the second (the freedom to disobey). It also leads us back to a point we made earlier about the progressive division of the human social universe into smaller and smaller units, beginning with the appearance of ‘culture areas’ (a fascination of ethnologists in the central European tradition, in which Steiner first trained).
斯坦纳的博士论文的较短版本,确实保存了下来,重点是他所谓的 “前奴隶制度”。讽刺的是,考虑到他自己的生活故事,这本书研究了在不同的文化和历史背景下,那些失去联系的人们会发生什么:那些因债务或过错而被逐出家族的人;弃儿、罪犯、离家出走者。它可以被解读为一部历史,说明像他这样的难民最初是如何受到欢迎的,被当作几乎是神圣的存在,然后逐渐被贬低和剥削,又很像在苏美尔神庙工厂工作的妇女。从本质上讲,斯坦纳讲述的故事似乎正是关于我们所说的第一种基本自由(迁离或重新安置)的崩溃,以及这如何为第二种自由(不服从的自由)的丧失铺平道路。这也让我们回到我们之前提出的观点,即人类社会世界逐渐被划分为越来越小的单位,从 “文化区” 的出现开始(这是中欧传统中的民族学家的魅力所在,斯坦纳首先在此接受培训)。
What happens, Steiner asked, when expectations that make freedom of movement possible – the norms of hospitality and asylum, civility and shelter – erode? Why does this so often appear to be a catalyst for situations where some people can exert arbitrary power over others? Steiner worked his way in careful detail through cases ranging from the Amazonian Huitoto and East African Safwa to the Tibeto-Burman Lushai. Along the journey he suggested one possible answer to the question that had so puzzled Robert Lowie, and later Clastres: if stateless societies do regularly organize themselves in such a way that chiefs have no coercive power, then how did top-down forms of organization ever come into the world to begin with? You’ll recall how both Lowie and Clastres were driven to the same conclusion: that they must have been the product of religious revelation. Steiner provided an alternative route. Perhaps, he suggested, it all goes back to charity.
斯坦纳问道,当使行动自由成为可能的期望 —— 好客和庇护、文明和庇护的规范 —— 受到侵蚀时,会发生什么?为什么这往往会成为一些人可以对其他人施加任意权力的情况的催化剂?斯坦纳仔细地研究了从亚马逊的 Huitoto 和东非的 Safwa 到西藏·布尔曼的 Lushai 等案例。在这个过程中,他提出了一个可能的答案,这个问题曾让罗伯特·洛维以及后来的克拉斯特里感到困惑:如果无国籍社会确实经常以酋长没有强制力的方式组织起来,那么自上而下的组织形式是如何开始进入世界的呢?你会记得洛伊和克拉斯特雷斯是如何被逼到同一个结论的:他们一定是宗教启示的产物。斯坦纳提供了一条替代路线。他建议,也许这一切都可以追溯到慈善。
In Amazonian societies, not only orphans but also widows, the mad, disabled or deformed – if they had no one else to look after them – were allowed to take refuge in the chief’s residence, where they received a share of communal meals. To these were occasionally added war captives, especially children taken in raiding expeditions. Among the Safwa or Lushai, runaways, debtors, criminals or others needing protection held the same status as those who surrendered in battle. All became members of the chief’s retinue, and the younger males often took on the role of police-like enforcers. How much power the chief actually had over his retainers – Steiner uses the Roman Law term potestas, which denotes among other things a father’s power of arbitrary command over his dependants and their property – would vary, depending how easy it was for wards to run away and find refuge elsewhere, or to maintain at least some ties with relatives, clans or outsiders willing to stand up for them. How far such henchmen could be relied on to enforce the chief’s will also varied; but the sheer potential was important.
在亚马逊社会中,不仅是孤儿,而且还有寡妇、疯子、残疾人或畸形人 —— 如果他们没有其他人照顾的话 —— 都被允许在酋长的住所避难,在那里他们可以得到一份公共膳食。偶尔也有战俘,特别是在突袭中被俘的儿童。在萨夫瓦人或卢萨伊人中,逃亡者、债务人、罪犯或其他需要保护的人与那些在战斗中投降的人拥有同样的地位。所有的人都成为酋长的随从,年轻的男性往往扮演着类似警察的执行者的角色。首领对其家臣的实际权力有多大 —— 斯坦纳使用罗马法术语 potestas,除其他外,表示父亲对其家属及其财产的任意指挥权 —— 会有所不同,这取决于被监护人逃跑并在其他地方找到避难所,或至少与愿意为他们出头的亲属、部族或外人保持一些联系的容易程度。在多大程度上可以依靠这些心腹来执行酋长的意志也是不同的;但纯粹的潜力是重要的。
In all such cases, the process of giving refuge did generally lead to the transformation of basic domestic arrangements, especially as captured women were incorporated, further reinforcing the potestas of fathers. It is possible to detect something of this logic in almost all historically documented royal courts, which invariably attracted those considered freakish or detached. There seems to have been no region of the world, from China to the Andes, where courtly societies did not host such obviously distinctive individuals; and few monarchs who did not also claim to be the protectors of widows and orphans. One could easily imagine something along these lines was already happening in certain hunter-gatherer communities during much earlier periods of history. The physically anomalous individuals accorded lavish burials in the last Ice Age must also have been the focus of much caring attention while alive. No doubt there are sequences of development linking such practices to later royal courts – we’ve caught glimpses of them, as in Predynastic Egypt – even if we are still unable to reconstruct most of the links.
在所有这些情况下,提供庇护的过程通常会导致基本家庭安排的改变,特别是当被俘的妇女被纳入其中,进一步加强了父亲的权力。在几乎所有有历史记载的皇家宫廷中都可以发现这种逻辑,它们总是吸引那些被认为是怪异或离群的人。从中国到安第斯山脉,世界上似乎没有哪个地区的宫廷社会不接纳这种明显与众不同的人;也没有哪个君主不声称自己是寡妇和孤儿的保护者。我们可以很容易地想象,在历史上更早的时期,某些狩猎·采集者社区已经发生了类似的事情。在上个冰河时代,那些身体异常的人被给予了豪华的葬礼,他们在世时也一定是很多人关心的焦点。毫无疑问,有一些发展顺序将这种做法与后来的王室法庭联系起来 —— 我们已经瞥见了它们,如埃及前王朝 —— 尽管我们仍然无法重建大部分的联系。
Steiner may not have foregrounded the issue, but his observations are directly relevant to debates about the origins of patriarchy. Feminist anthropologists have long argued for a connection between external (largely male) violence and the transformation of women’s status in the home. In archaeological and historical terms, we are only just beginning to gather together enough material to begin understanding how that process actually worked.
斯坦纳可能没有把这个问题放在前面,但他的观察与关于父权制的起源的辩论直接相关。女权主义人类学家长期以来一直认为,外部(主要是男性)暴力与妇女在家庭中地位的转变之间存在着联系。在考古学和历史学方面,我们才刚刚开始收集足够的材料,开始了解这一过程究竟是如何进行的。
The research that culminated in this book began almost a decade ago, essentially as a form of play. We pursued it at first, it would be fair to say, in a spirit of mild defiance towards our more ‘serious’ academic responsibilities. Mainly we were just curious about how the new archaeological evidence that had been building up for the last thirty years might change our notions of early human history, especially the parts bound up with debates on the origins of social inequality. Before long, though, we realized that what we were doing was potentially important, because hardly anyone else in our fields seemed to be doing this work of synthesis. Often, we found ourselves searching in vain for books that we assumed must exist but, it turns out, simply didn’t – for instance, compendia of early cities that lacked top-down governance, or accounts of how democratic decision-making was conducted in Africa or the Americas, or comparisons of what we’ve called ‘heroic societies’. The literature is riddled with absences.
最终形成这本书的研究始于近十年前,基本上是一种游戏形式。可以说,我们一开始是本着对我们更 “严肃” 的学术责任的轻微蔑视来进行研究的。主要是我们对过去三十年来不断积累的新的考古学证据如何改变我们对早期人类历史的概念感到好奇,特别是与社会不平等的起源有关的辩论部分。但不久之后,我们就意识到我们所做的事情有潜在的重要性,因为在我们的领域里几乎没有人在做这种综合的工作。我们经常发现自己在徒劳地寻找那些我们认为一定存在但事实证明根本不存在的书籍 —— 例如,缺乏自上而下治理的早期城市的汇编,或关于非洲或美洲如何进行民主决策的描述,或对我们称之为 “英雄社会” 的比较。这些文献充满了缺失。
The research that culminated in this book began almost a decade ago, essentially as a form of play. We pursued it at first, it would be fair to say, in a spirit of mild defiance towards our more ‘serious’ academic responsibilities. Mainly we were just curious about how the new archaeological evidence that had been building up for the last thirty years might change our notions of early human history, especially the parts bound up with debates on the origins of social inequality. Before long, though, we realized that what we were doing was potentially important, because hardly anyone else in our fields seemed to be doing this work of synthesis. Often, we found ourselves searching in vain for books that we assumed must exist but, it turns out, simply didn’t – for instance, compendia of early cities that lacked top-down governance, or accounts of how democratic decision-making was conducted in Africa or the Americas, or comparisons of what we’ve called ‘heroic societies’. The literature is riddled with absences.
最终形成这本书的研究始于近十年前,基本上是一种游戏形式。可以说,我们一开始是本着对我们更 “严肃” 的学术责任的轻微蔑视来进行研究的。主要是我们对过去三十年来不断积累的新的考古学证据如何改变我们对早期人类历史的概念感到好奇,特别是与社会不平等的起源有关的辩论部分。但不久之后,我们就意识到我们所做的事情有潜在的重要性,因为在我们的领域里几乎没有人在做这种综合的工作。我们经常发现自己在徒劳地寻找那些我们认为一定存在但事实证明根本不存在的书籍 —— 例如,缺乏自上而下治理的早期城市的汇编,或关于非洲或美洲如何进行民主决策的描述,或对我们称之为 “英雄社会” 的比较。这些文献充满了缺失。
We eventually came to realize that this reluctance to synthesize was not simply a product of reticence on the part of highly specialized scholars, although this is certainly a factor. To some degree it was simply the lack of an appropriate language. What, for instance, does one even call a ‘city lacking top-down structures of governance’? At the moment there is no commonly accepted term. Dare one call it a ‘democracy’? A ‘republic’? Such words (like ‘civilization’) are so freighted with historical baggage that most archaeologists and anthropologists instinctively recoil from them, and historians tend to limit their use to Europe. Does one, then, call it an ‘egalitarian city’? Probably not, since to evoke such a term is to invite the obvious demand for proof that the city was ‘really’ egalitarian – which usually means, in practice, showing that no element of structural inequality existed in any aspect of its inhabitants’ lives, including households and religious arrangements. Since such evidence will rarely, if ever, be forthcoming, the conclusion would have to be that these are not really egalitarian cities after all.
我们最终认识到,这种不愿意综合的态度并不仅仅是高度专业化的学者的沉默的产物,尽管这当然是一个因素。在某种程度上,它只是缺乏一种适当的语言。例如,我们该如何称呼一个 “缺乏自上而下治理结构的城市”?目前,还没有一个普遍接受的术语。人们是否敢称其为 “民主”?一个 “共和国”?这样的词(如 “文明”)是如此沉重的历史包袱,以至于大多数考古学家和人类学家本能地回避它们,而且历史学家倾向于将它们的使用限制在欧洲。那么,我们是否可以称其为 “平等主义城市”?可能不会,因为唤起这样一个术语就会招致明显的要求,即证明该城市是 “真正的” 平等主义 —— 这通常意味着,在实践中,显示其居民生活的任何方面,包括家庭和宗教安排,都不存在结构性的不平等因素。由于这种证据很少(如果有的话)会出现,所以结论将是这些城市毕竟不是真正的平等主义城市。
By the same logic, one might easily conclude there aren’t really any ‘egalitarian societies’, except possibly certain very small foraging bands. Many researchers in the field of evolutionary anthropology do, in fact, make precisely this argument. But ultimately the result of this kind of thinking is to lump together all ‘non-egalitarian’ cities or indeed all ‘non-egalitarian societies’, which is a little like saying there’s no meaningful difference between a hippie commune and a biker gang, since neither are entirely non-violent. All this achieves, at the end of the day, is to leave us literally at a loss for words when confronted with certain major aspects of human history. We fall strangely mute in the face of any kind of evidence for humans doing something other than ‘rushing headlong for their chains’. Sensing a sea change in the evidence of the past, we decided to approach things the other way round.
根据同样的逻辑,人们可能很容易得出结论,除了可能是某些非常小的觅食带,并没有真正的 “平等主义社会”。事实上,进化人类学领域的许多研究人员正是在做这种论证。但这种思维的最终结果是把所有的 “非平等主义” 城市或事实上所有的 “非平等主义社会” 混为一谈,这有点像说嬉皮公社和摩托车帮之间没有任何有意义的区别,因为两者都不是完全非暴力的。最后,这一切的结果是让我们在面对人类历史的某些主要方面时,真的不知所措。面对人类除了 “冲向他们的锁链” 之外还做了其他事情的任何证据,我们都奇怪地哑口无言。由于感觉到过去的证据发生了巨大的变化,我们决定以另一种方式来处理问题。
What this meant, in practice, was reversing a lot of polarities. It meant ditching the language of ‘equality’ and ‘inequality’, unless there was explicit evidence that ideologies of social equality were actually present on the ground. It meant asking, for instance, what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 in which it did? What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others? In the process, we often found ourselves surprised. We’d never have guessed, for instance, that slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places; and that very possibly the same is true of war. Obviously, such abolitions are rarely definitive. Still, the periods in which free or relatively free societies existed are hardly insignificant. In fact, if you bracket the Eurasian Iron Age (which is effectively what we have been doing here), they represent the vast majority of human social experience.
这意味着,在实践中,扭转了很多的两极分化。这意味着抛弃 “平等” 和 “不平等” 的语言,除非有明确的证据表明社会平等的意识形态确实存在于地面上。这意味着,例如,如果我们赋予谷物驯化没有导致娇生惯养的贵族、常备军或债务农奴制出现的 5000 年以意义,而不仅仅是它出现的 5000 年,会发生什么?如果我们把某些时间和地点对城市生活或奴隶制的拒绝视为与其他地方出现这些相同现象一样重要的事情,会发生什么?在这个过程中,我们经常发现自己很惊讶。例如,我们从来没有猜到,奴隶制很可能在历史上多次在多个地方被废除;而战争也很可能是如此。很明显,这种废除很少是确定的。不过,自由或相对自由的社会存在的时期也并非微不足道。事实上,如果你把欧亚铁器时代排除在外(这实际上就是我们在这里所做的),它们代表了人类社会经验的绝大部分。
Social theorists have a tendency to write about the past as if everything that happened could have been predicted beforehand. This is somewhat dishonest, since we’re all aware that when we actually try to predict the future we almost invariably get it wrong – and this is just as true of social theorists as anybody else. Nonetheless, it’s hard to resist the temptation to write and think as if the current state of the world, in the early twenty-first century, is the inevitable outcome of the last 10,000 years of history, while in reality, of course, we have little or no idea what the world will be like even in 2075, let alone 2150.
社会理论家有一种写过去的倾向,好像所有发生的事情都可以事先预测到。这有点不诚实,因为我们都知道,当我们真正试图预测未来时,我们几乎无一例外地会出错 —— 社会理论家和其他任何人一样都是如此。尽管如此,我们还是很难抵制写作和思考的诱惑,仿佛 21 世纪初的世界现状是过去一万年历史的必然结果,而实际上,我们当然很少或根本不知道 2075 年的世界会是什么样子,更不用说 2150 年。
Who knows? Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this as yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies – say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighbourhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction – will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids or statues more like historical curiosities. What if we were to take that approach now and look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternative possibilities: roads not taken?
谁知道呢?也许,如果我们的物种真的存在,并且有一天我们从这个尚不可知的未来向后看,遥远的过去的某些方面现在看来是不正常的 —— 比如,在社区范围内工作的官僚机构;由邻里委员会管理的城市;妇女在正式职位上占多数的政府系统;或基于照顾而不是所有权和开采的土地管理形式 —— 将看起来是真正的重大突破,而伟大的石头金字塔或雕像更像是历史奇珍。如果我们现在采取这种方法,并且不把米诺斯克里特或霍普韦尔看成是不可避免地通往国家和帝国的道路上的随机颠簸,而是看成是替代的可能性:没有采取的道路,那会怎么样?
After all, those things really did exist, even if our habitual ways of looking at the past seem designed to put them at the margins rather than at the centre of things. Much of this book has been devoted to recalibrating those scales; to reminding us that people did actually live in those ways, often for many centuries, even millennia. In some ways, such a perspective might seem even more tragic than our standard narrative of civilization as the inevitable fall from grace. It means we could have been living under radically different conceptions of what human society is actually about. It means that mass enslavement, genocide, prison camps, even patriarchy or regimes of wage labour never had to happen. But on the other hand it also suggests that, even now, the possibilities for human intervention are far greater than we’re inclined to think.
毕竟,这些东西确实存在,即使我们习惯性地看待过去的方式似乎是为了把它们放在边缘而不是事物的中心位置。本书的大部分内容都致力于重新调整这些尺度;提醒我们,人们确实以这些方式生活过,而且往往持续了许多个世纪,甚至数千年。在某些方面,这样的观点可能比我们对文明的标准叙述更悲惨,因为文明是不可避免的堕落。这意味着我们可能一直生活在对人类社会实际意义的截然不同的概念之下。这意味着大规模奴役、种族灭绝、集中营、甚至父权制或雇佣劳动制度都不一定会发生。但另一方面,它也表明,即使是现在,人类干预的可能性也远比我们倾向于认为的要大。
We began this book with a quote which refers to the Greek notion of kairos as one of those occasional moments in a society’s history when its frames of reference undergo a shift – a metamorphosis of the fundamental principles and symbols, when the lines between myth and history, science and magic become blurred – and, therefore, real change is possible. Philosophers sometimes like to speak of ‘the Event’ – a political revolution, a scientific discovery, an artistic masterpiece – that is, a breakthrough which reveals aspects of reality that had previously been unimaginable but, once seen, can never be unseen. If so, kairos is the kind of time in which Events are prone to happen.
我们以一句话开始这本书,这句话提到了希腊的 kairos 概念,即在一个社会的历史上有一个偶然的时刻,其参考框架经历了一个转变 —— 基本原则和符号的蜕变,当神话和历史、科学和魔法之间的界限变得模糊不清 —— 因此,真正的改变是可能的。哲学家们有时喜欢谈论 “事件” —— 一场政治革命、一个科学发现、一个艺术杰作 —— 也就是说,一个突破揭示了现实的某些方面,这些方面以前是无法想象的,但一旦看到,就永远无法不看到了。如果是这样,kairos 就是事件容易发生的那种时间。
Societies around the world appear to be cascading towards such a point. This is particularly true of those which, since the First World War, have been in the habit of calling themselves ‘Western’. On the one hand, fundamental breakthroughs in the physical sciences, or even artistic expression, no longer seem to occur with anything like the regularity people came to expect in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet at the same time, our scientific means of understanding the past, not just our species’ past but that of our planet, has been advancing with dizzying speed. Scientists in 2020 are not (as readers of mid-twentieth-century science fiction might have hoped) encountering alien civilizations in distant star systems; but they are encountering radically different forms of society under their own feet, some forgotten and newly rediscovered, others more familiar, but now understood in entirely new ways.
全世界的社会似乎都在向这样一个点层层递进。自第一次世界大战以来,那些习惯于自称 “西方” 的社会更是如此。一方面,物理科学的根本性突破,甚至是艺术表现,似乎不再像人们在 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初所期待的那样有规律地发生。然而,与此同时,我们了解过去的科学手段,不仅是我们人类的过去,还有我们星球的过去,一直在以令人眩晕的速度前进。2020 年的科学家们并没有(像二十世纪中期科幻小说的读者可能希望的那样)在遥远的恒星系统中遇到外星文明;但他们在自己的脚下遇到了截然不同的社会形式,有些被遗忘,有些被重新发现,有些则更加熟悉,但现在以全新的方式理解。
In developing the scientific means to know our own past, we have exposed the mythical substructure of our ‘social science’ – what once appeared unassailable axioms, the stable points around which our self-knowledge is organized, are scattering like mice. What is the purpose of all this new knowledge, if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become? If not, in other words, to rediscover the meaning of our third basic freedom: the freedom to create new and different forms of social reality?
在发展了解我们自己的过去的科学手段的过程中,我们暴露了我们的 “社会科学” 的神话性子结构 —— 那些曾经看起来不可动摇的公理,那些围绕着我们的自我知识的稳定点,正在像老鼠一样散开。所有这些新知识的目的是什么,如果不是为了重塑我们对我们是谁以及我们可能成为什么的概念?换句话说,如果不是为了重新发现我们第三个基本自由的意义:创造新的和不同形式的社会现实的自由?
Myth in itself is not the problem here. It shouldn’t be mistaken for bad or infantile science. Just as all societies have their science, all societies have their myths. Myth is the way in which human societies give structure and meaning to experience. But the larger mythic structures of history we’ve been deploying for the last several centuries simply don’t work any more; they are impossible to reconcile with the evidence now before our eyes, and the structures and meanings they encourage are tawdry, shop-worn and politically disastrous.
神话本身不是这里的问题。它不应该被误认为是坏的或幼稚的科学。正如所有社会都有它们的科学一样,所有社会都有它们的神话。神话是人类社会赋予经验以结构和意义的方式。但是,我们在过去几个世纪里一直在部署的更大的历史神话结构根本不再起作用;它们不可能与现在摆在我们眼前的证据相协调,而且它们所鼓励的结构和意义都是俗气的、陈旧的和政治上灾难性的。
No doubt, for a while at least, very little will change. Whole fields of knowledge – not to mention university chairs and departments, scientific journals, prestigious research grants, libraries, databases, school curricula and the like – have been designed to fit the old structures and the old questions. Max Planck once remarked that new scientific truths don’t replace old ones by convincing established scientists that they were wrong; they do so because proponents of the older theory eventually die, and generations that follow find the new truths and theories to be familiar, obvious even. We are optimists. We like to think it will not take that long.
毫无疑问,至少在一段时间内,很少会有变化。整个知识领域 —— 更不用说大学的教席和院系、科学期刊、著名的研究基金、图书馆、数据库、学校课程等等 —— 都被设计成适合旧的结构和旧的问题。马克斯·普朗克(Max Planck)曾经说过,新的科学真理并不是通过说服老科学家相信他们是错误的来取代旧的真理;它们之所以这样做,是因为旧理论的支持者最终死亡,而随后的几代人发现新的真理和理论是熟悉的,甚至是明显的。我们是乐观主义者。我们喜欢认为这不会花那么长时间。
In fact, we have already taken a first step. We can see more clearly now what is going on when, for example, a study that is rigorous in every other respect begins from the unexamined assumption that there was some ‘original’ form of human society; that its nature was fundamentally good or evil; that a time before inequality and political awareness existed; that something happened to change all this; that ‘civilization’ and ‘complexity’ always come at the price of human freedoms; that participatory democracy is natural in small groups but cannot possibly scale up to anything like a city or a nation state.
事实上,我们已经迈出了第一步。我们现在可以更清楚地看到,例如,当一项在其他各方面都很严谨的研究从未经审查的假设开始,即存在某种 “原始” 形式的人类社会;其本质是根本性的善或恶;在不平等和政治意识之前的时代存在;发生了一些事情来改变这一切;“文明” 和 “复杂性” 总是以人类自由为代价;参与式民主在小团体中是自然的,但不可能扩展到像城市或民族国家那样的东西。
We know, now, that we are in the presence of myths.
我们知道,现在,我们是在神话的面前。
1. To take one example, Ian Morris’s (2015) Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve sets itself the ambitious challenge of finding a uniform measure of inequality applicable across the entire span of human history, by translating the ‘values’ of Ice Age hunter-gatherers and Neolithic farmers into terms familiar to modern-day economists, and then using those to establish Gini coefficients (i.e. formal inequality rates). It’s a laudable experiment, but one that quickly leads to some very odd conclusions. For instance, in a 2015 piece for the New York Times, Morris estimated the income of a Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer at $1.10 a day, pegged to 1990 currency values. Where does this figure come from? Presumably it has something to do with the calorific value of daily food intake. But if we’re comparing this to daily incomes today, wouldn’t we also have to factor in all the other things Palaeolithic foragers got for free, but which we ourselves would expect to pay for: free security, free dispute resolution, free primary education, free care of the elderly, free medicine, not to mention entertainment costs, music, storytelling and religious services? Even when it comes to food, we must consider quality: after all, we’re talking about 100 per cent organic free-range produce here, washed down with purest natural spring water. Much contemporary income goes to mortgages and rents. But consider the camping fees for prime Palaeolithic locations along the Dordogne or the Vézère, not to mention the high-end evening classes in naturalistic rock-painting and ivory-carving – and all those fur coats. Surely all this must cost wildly in excess of $1.10 a day. As we’ll see in Chapter Four, it’s not for nothing that anthropologists sometimes refer to foragers as ‘the original affluent society’. Such a life today would not come cheap. Admittedly, this is all a bit silly, but that’s really our point: if one reduces world history to Gini coefficients, silly things will, necessarily, follow.
2. Fukuyama 2011: 43, 53–4.
3. Diamond 2012: 10–15.
4. Fukuyama 2011: 48.
5. Diamond 2012: 11.
6. In the case of Fukuyama and Diamond one can, at least, note that they were never trained in the relevant disciplines (the first is a political scientist, the other has a PhD on the physiology of the gall bladder). Still, even when anthropologists, archaeologists and historians try their hand at ‘big-picture’ narratives, they have an odd tendency to end up with some similarly minor variation on Rousseau. Flannery and Marcus’s (2012) The Creation of Inequality: How our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire, for example, offers all sorts of interesting insights into how inequality might emerge in human societies, but their overall framing of human history remains explicitly wedded to Rousseau’s second Discourse, concluding that humanity’s best hope of a more egalitarian future is to ‘put hunters and gatherers in charge’. Walter Scheidel’s more economically informed study, The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (2017), concludes – just as dismally – that there’s really nothing we can do about inequality: civilization invariably puts in charge a small elite who grab more and more of the pie, and the only thing that has ever been successful in dislodging them is catastrophe in the form of war, plague, mass conscription, wholesale suffering and death. Half-measures never work. So if you don’t want to go back to living in a cave, or die in a nuclear holocaust (which presumably also ends up with the survivors in caves), you’re just going to have to accept the existence of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.
7. Rousseau 1984 [1754]: 78.
8. As articulated by Judith Shklar (1964), the renowned Harvard political theorist.
9. Rousseau 1984 [1754].: 122.
10. As a matter of fact, Rousseau, unlike Hobbes, was not a fatalist. For Hobbes, all things large and small in history were to be understood as the unfolding of forces set in motion by God, which are ultimately beyond the capacity of humans to control (see Hunter 1989). Even a tailor making a garment is entering, from his first stitch, into a flow of historical entanglements that he is powerless to resist and of which he is largely unaware; his precise actions are tiny links in a great chain of causality that is the very fabric of human history, and – in this rather extreme metaphysics of entanglement – to suggest that he might have been doing these things some alternative way is to deny the whole, irreversible course of world history. For Rousseau, by contrast, what humans make, they could always unmake, or at least do differently. We could free ourselves from the chains that bind us; it just wasn’t going to be easy (see, again, Shklar 1964 for a classic discussion of this aspect of Rousseau’s thought).
11. Pinker 2012: 39, 43.
12. If a trace of impatience can be detected in our presentation, the reason is this: so many contemporary authors seem to enjoy imagining themselves as modern-day counterparts to the great social philosophers of the Enlightenment, men like Hobbes and Rousseau, playing out the same grand dialogue but with a more accurate cast of characters. That dialogue in turn is drawn from the empirical findings of social scientists, including archaeologists and anthropologists like ourselves. Yet in fact the quality of their empirical generalizations is hardly better; in some ways it’s probably worse. At some point, you have to take the toys back from the children.
13. Pinker 2012; 2018.
14. Pinker 2012: 42.
15. Tilley 2015.
16. Formicola 2007.
17. Margaret Mead did this once, when she suggested that the first sign of ‘civilization’ in human history was not tool use but a 15,000-year-old skeleton that showed signs of having healed from a broken femur. It takes six weeks, she noted, to recover from such an injury; most animals with broken femurs simply die because their companions abandon them; one of the things that makes humans so unusual is precisely that we take care of one another in such situations.
18. Below, n.21. As others point out, Yanomami tend to sleep together six to even ten people in the same bed. This requires a degree of good-natured mutual accommodation of which few contemporary social theorists would be capable. If they were really anything like the ‘fierce savages’ of undergraduate caricature, there would be no Yanomami as they’d all have long since killed each other for snoring.
19. In reality, far from being pristine exemplars of our ‘ancestral condition’, the Yanomami in the 1960s to 1980s, when Chagnon conducted fieldwork among them, had been exposed to decades of European incursions, intensified by the discovery of gold on their lands. Over that period, Yanomami populations were decimated by epidemics of infectious diseases introduced by missionaries, prospectors, anthropologists and government agents; see Kopenawa and Albert 2013: 2–3.
20. Chagnon 1988.
21. Some were about the statistics Chagnon presented, and his claim that men who achieved a state of ritual purity (unokai) obtained more wives and offspring than others. A key issue here, which Chagnon never entirely cleared up, is that unokai status was not reserved for men who had killed; it could also be achieved, for example, by shooting an arrow into the corpse of an enemy already slain, or indeed by causing death through non-physical means, such as sorcery. Others pointed out that most unokai were on the older side of the age spectrum, and some held the status of village headmen: both would have ensured more offspring, with no direct relationship to warfare. Still others pointed out a logical flaw in Chagnon’s suggestion that homicide acted both as deterrent to further killing (the unokai having earned a fierce reputation), and at the same time kept in motion a cycle of revenge killings on the part of embittered kinsmen: a kind of ‘war of all against all’. Criticisms of Chagnon: Albert 1989; Ferguson 1989; and see Chagnon 1990 for a response.
22. Geertz 2001. Academics are very prone to a phenomenon called ‘schismogenesis’, which we will be exploring at various points in this book.
23. The framers of the US Constitution, for example, were quite explicitly anti-democratic and made clear in their own public statements that they designed the Federal Government in large part to head off the risk of ‘democracy’ breaking out in one of the former colonies (they were particularly worried about Pennsylvania). Meanwhile, actual direct democratic decision-making had been practised regularly in various parts of Africa or Amazonia, or for that matter in Russian or French peasant assemblies, for thousands of years; see Graeber 2007b.
24. For example, one would not have to waste one’s time coming up with convoluted reasons why, say, forms of decision-making that look like democracy outside Europe are not ‘really’ democracy, philosophical arguments about nature that take rigorous logical form are not ‘really’ science, etc.
25. Chagnon (1998: 990) chose to end his famous Science paper with an anecdote to this very effect: ‘A particularly acute insight into the power of law to thwart killing for revenge was provided to me by a young Yanomamö man in 1987. He had been taught Spanish by missionaries and sent to the territorial capital for training in practical nursing. There he discovered police and laws. He excitedly told me that he had visited the town’s largest pata [the territorial governor] and urged him to make law and police available to his people so that they would not have to engage any longer in their wars of revenge and have to live in constant fear.’
26. Pinker 2012: 54.
27. As recounted by Valero to Ettore Biocca and published in 1965 under the latter’s authorship.
28. For which, see the evidence compiled in a (1977) thesis by J. N. Heard: ‘The Assimilation of Captives on the American Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’.
29. In his (1782) Letters from an American Farmer J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur noted how parents, at the end of a war, would visit Indian towns to reclaim their children: ‘To their inexpressible sorrow, they found them so completely Indianized, that many knew them no longer, and those whose more advanced ages permitted them to recollect their fathers and mothers, absolutely refused to follow them, and ran to their adopted parents for protection against the effusions of love their unhappy real parents lavished upon them.’ (cited in Heard 1977: 55–6, who also notes Crèvecoeur’s conclusion that the Indians must possess a ‘social bond singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us’.)
30. Franklin 1961 [1753]: 481–3.
31. ‘Alas! Alas!’ wrote James Willard Schultz – an eighteen-year-old from a prominent New York family who married into the Blackfoot, remaining with them until they were driven on to a reservation – ‘Why could not this simple life have continued? Why must the … swarms of settlers have invaded that wonderful land, and robbed its lords of all that made life worth living? They knew not care, nor hunger, nor want of any kind. From my window here, I hear the roar of the great city, and see the crowds hurrying by … “bound to the wheel” and there is no escape from it except by death. And this is civilization! I, for one, maintain that there is no … happiness in it. The Indians of the plains … alone knew what was perfect content and happiness, and that, we are told, is the chief end and aim of men – to be free from want, and worry, and care. Civilization will never furnish it, except to the very, very few.’ (Schultz 1935: 46; see also Heard 1977: 42)
32. See Heard 1977: 44, with references.
33. For example, the Wendat (‘Huron’) societies of Northeastern North America in the seventeenth century – to which we turn in the next chapter – of whom Trigger (1976: 62) notes that: ‘Relations of friendship and material reciprocity were extended beyond the Huron confederacy in the form of trading arrangements. In the historic period, trade was a source not only of luxury goods but of meat and skins which were vital to a population that had outstripped the resources of its nearby hunting territory. Important as these goods were, however, foreign trade was not merely an economic activity. It was embedded in a network of social relations that were, fundamentally, extensions of the friendly relationships that existed within the Huron confederacy.’ (Our emphasis.) For a general anthropological survey of ‘archaic trade’ the classic source remains Servet 1981; 1982. Most contemporary archaeologists are well aware of this literature, but tend to get caught up in debates over the difference between ‘trade’ and ‘gift exchange’, while assuming that the ultimate point of both is to enhance somebody’s status, either by profit, or by prestige, or both. Most will also acknowledge that there is something inherently valuable, even cosmologically significant, in the phenomenon of travel, the experience of remote places or the acquisition of exotic materials; but in the last resort, much of this too seems to come down to questions of status or prestige, as if no other possible motivation might exist for people interacting over long distances; for some further discussion of the issues see Wengrow 2010b.
34. On ‘dream economies’ among the Iroquois see Graeber 2001: 145–9.
35. Following Charles Hudson’s (1976: 89–91) interpretation of Cabeza de Vaca’s account.
36. DeBoer 2001.
1. In his (2009) Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727, Nabil Matar considers the relative lack of interest in Frankish Europe among medieval Muslim writers, and possible reasons for it (especially, pp. 6–18).
2. Many examples of this tendency are discussed in David Allen Harvey’s (2012) The French Enlightenment and its Others .
3. A notorious example was that of Christian Wolff, the most famous German philosopher in the period between Leibniz and Kant – he too was a Sinophile and lectured on the superiority of Chinese modes of government, with the ultimate effect that an envious colleague denounced him to the authorities, a warrant was issued for his arrest and he was forced to flee for his life.
4. Some classic statements, especially concerning North America, are to be found in: Chinard 1913; Healy 1958; Berkhofer 1978a, 1978b; Dickason 1984; McGregor 1988; Cro 1990; Pagden 1993; Sayre 1997; Franks 2002.
5. For example, Grinde 1977; Johansen 1982, 1998; Sioui 1992; Levy 1996; Tooker 1988; 1990; and cf. Graeber 2007b. The literature, however, focuses around the impact of Native ideas on American colonists, and has become bogged down in an argument about the specific ‘influence’ of the Haudenosaunee political confederation on the American Constitution. The original argument was actually much broader, suggesting that European settlers in the Americas only came to think of themselves as ‘Americans’ (rather than English or French or Dutch) when they began to adopt certain elements of Native American standards and sensibilities, from the indulgent treatment of children to ideals of republican self- governance.
6. Alfani and Frigeni 2016.
7. The best English-language source on these debates is Pagden 1986.
8. One of Rousseau’s rivals in the essay contest, the Marquis d’Argenson, who also failed to win a prize, made precisely this argument: monarchy allowed the truest equality, he argued, and absolutist monarchy most of all, since everyone is equal before the absolute power of the king.
9. Lovejoy and Boas (1935) compile and provide commentary on all the relevant texts.
10. As Barbara Alice Mann suggests to us (in personal communication), bourgeois women may have especially appreciated the Jesuit Relations because it allowed them to read about discussions of women’s sexual freedom in a form that was entirely acceptable to the Church.
11. David Allen Harvey (2012: 75–6), for instance, places Lahontan’s Dialogues (to which we shortly turn) in a literary class with works by Diderot and Rousseau, writers who had little if any direct experience of Native American peoples but invoked them as a ‘discursively constructed Other with which to interrogate European customs and civilization’. See also Pagden 1983; 1993.
12. It rarely seems to occur to anyone that (1) there are only so many logical arguments one can make, and intelligent people in similar circumstances will come up with similar rhetorical approaches, and (2) it is likely that European writers trained in the classics would be especially impressed by arguments that reminded them of ones they already knew from Greek or Roman rhetoric. Obviously, such accounts do not provide a direct window on to the original conversations, but to insist that they bear no relation at all seems equally absurd.
13. Technically, the Huron were a confederation of Iroquoian speakers that existed at the time the French arrived, but later scattered under attacks from the Haudenosaunee to the south and then reformed as the Wyandot or Wendat, along with refugees from the Petun and Neutral confederations. Their contemporary descendants prefer Wendat (pronounced ‘Wen-dot’), noting that ‘Huron’ was originally an insult, meaning (depending on the source) either ‘pig-haired’ or ‘malodorous’. Sources at the time regularly use ‘Huron’, and while we have followed Barbara Mann’s usage in changing it to ‘Wendat’ when quoting from indigenous speakers like Kandiaronk, we have maintained it in European sources.
14. Biard 1611: 173 –4, cited in Ellingson 2001: 51.
15. The Recollects were a branch of the Franciscan Order, who took vows of poverty and were among the first missionaries dispatched to New France.
16. Sagard 1939 [1632]: 192.
17. Ibid.: 88–9.
18. Wallace 1958; cf. also Graeber 2001, Chapter Five.
19. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610–1791, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites, and henceforth: JR 6: 109–10/241. The phrase ‘captain’ is used indiscriminately in the French sources for any male in a position of authority, whether that person be a simple headman of a band or village, or the holder of an official rank in the Wendat or Haudenosaunee Confederation.
20. JR 28: 47.
21. JR 28: 48–9, cf. JR 10: 211–21.
22. JR 28: 49–50. Here’s a different Jesuit father, returning to the donkey theme again: ‘There is nothing so difficult as to control the tribes of America. All these barbarians have the law of wild asses, – they are born, live, and die in a liberty without restraint; they do not know what is meant by bridle or bit. With them, to conquer one’s passions is considered a great joke, while to give free rein to the senses is a lofty philosophy. The Law of our Lord is far removed from this dissoluteness; it gives us boundaries and prescribes limits, outside of which we cannot step without offending God and reason.’ (JR 12:191–2).
23. JR 5: 175.
24. JR 33: 49.
25. JR 28: 61–2.
26. JR 15:155, also in Franks 2002: 4; cf. Blackburn 2000: 68.
27. They were also unevenly accepted. Most Jesuits still subscribed to the old Renaissance doctrine that ‘savages’ had once been of a higher level of grace and of civilization, and had degenerated (Blackburn 2000: 69).
28. A comprehensive review of the literature by Ellingson (2001) finds the view that European observers regularly romanticized those they considered savages to be entirely unfounded; even the most positive accounts tended to be fairly nuanced, recognizing both virtues and vices.
29. So according to some sources at the time, and Wendat oral traditions (Steckley 1981).
30. The official histories claim that he converted at the very end of his life, and it’s true he was buried as a Christian in Notre-Dame Church in Montreal, but Mann argues convincingly that the story of the deathbed conversion and burial is likely to have been a mere political ploy on the part of the missionaries (Mann 2001: 53).
31. Chinard 1931; Allan 1966; Richter 1972; Betts 1984: 129–36; Ouellet 1990, 1995; White 1991; Basile 1997; Sayre 1997; Muthu 2003: 25–9; Pinette 2006; but for a significant exception see Hall 2003: 160 ff.
32. Sioui 1972, 1992, 1999; Steckley 1981, 2014: 56–62; Mann 2001.
33. Mann 2001: 55.
34. Ibid.: 57–61.
35. 1704: 106–7. Cited references are to the 1735 English edition of Dialogues, but the translation in this instance is a combination of that, Mann’s (2001: 67–8), and our own. Subsequent translations are our own, based on the 1735 edition.
36. ‘Assuming he is so powerful and great, how likely is it that such an unknowable being would have made himself into a man, dwelt in misery, and died in infamy, just to work off the sin of some ignoble creature who was as far beneath him as a fly is beneath the sun and the stars? Where does that leave his infinite power? What good would it do him, and what use would he make of it? For my part, it seems to me that to believe in a debasement of this nature is to doubt the unimaginable sweep of his omnipotence, while making extravagant presumptions about ourselves.’ (cited in Mann 2001: 66)
37. Bateson 1935; 1936.
38. Sahlins 1999: 402, 414.
39. Allan 1966: 95.
40. Ouellet 1995: 328. After a hiatus, another spate of similar plays with Indian heroes were produced in the 1760s: La Jeune Indienne (1764) by Chamfort and Le Huron (1768) by Marmontel.
41. See Harvey (2012) for a good recent summary of the impact of foreign perspectives, real and imagined, on social thinking in the French Enlightenment.
42. The expression is Pagden’s (1983).
43. So, Etienne 1876; cf. Kavanagh 1994. In 1752, just around the time de Graffigny’s second edition appeared, a former soldier, spy and theatre director named Jean Henri Maubert de Gouvest also released a novel called Lettres Iroquois, the correspondence of an imaginary Iroquois traveller named Igli, which was also hugely successful.
44. ‘Without gold, it is impossible to acquire a part of this earth which nature has given in common to all men. Without possessing what they call property, it is impossible to have gold, and by an inconsistency which is an outrage to natural common sense, and which exasperates one’s reason, this haughty nation, following an empty code of honour entirely of its own invention, considers it a disgrace to receive from anyone other than the sovereign whatever is necessary to sustain one’s life and position.’ (de Graffigny 2009 [1747]: 58).
45. Meek 1976: 70–71. Turgot was writing on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Later evolutionists would simply replace ‘industrial’ with ‘commercial’. No pastoral society actually existed in the New World, but somehow early evolutionists never seemed to consider this a problem.
46. It is to be noted that the question is framed in traditional terms: the arts and sciences are assumed not to progress, but rather still to be in the process of being restored to their former (presumably ancient) glory. It was only over the course of the next decade that notions of progress became widely accepted.
47. This is the third footnote of the Discourse on the Arts & Sciences, sometimes referred to as ‘The First Discourse’. Montaigne’s essay ‘On Cannibals’, written in 1580, appears to be the first to consider indigenous American perspectives on European societies, with Tupinamba visitors questioning the arbitrariness of royal authority and wondering why the homeless did not burn down the mansions of the rich. The fact that so many societies appeared to maintain peace and social order without coercive institutions or even, it seemed, formal institutions of government of any kind caught the attention of European observers from very early on. Leibniz, for instance, who, as we’ve seen, had long been promoting Chinese models of bureaucracy as the embodiment of rational statecraft, felt this was what was really significant in Lahontan’s testimony: the possibility that statecraft might not be required at all (Ouellet 1995: 323).
48. Rousseau 1984 [1754]: 109.
49. Rousseau described himself as an avid reader of travelogues and does cite Lebeau, who is basically summarizing Lahontan, as well as l’Arlequin sauvage (Allan 1966: 97–8; Muthu 2003: 12–13, 25–8; Pagden 1983: 33). It’s extremely unlikely that Rousseau had not read Lahontan in the original, though even if he hadn’t it would just mean that he had come by the same arguments second-hand.
50. Other examples: ‘The cultivation of the earth necessarily brought about its distribution; and property, once recognised, gave rise to the first rules of justice; for, to secure each man his own, it had to be possible for each to have something. Besides, as men began to look forward to the future, and all had something to lose, every one had reason to apprehend that reprisals would follow any injury he might do to another.’ Compare that passage to Kandiaronk’s argument, cited above, that the Wendat intentionally avoided divisions of wealth because they had no desire to create a coercive legal system. Montesquieu made the same point in discussing the Osage, noting that ‘the division of lands is what principally increases the civil code. Among nations where they have not made this division there are very few civil laws’ – an observation which seems to have been derived partly from Montesquieu’s conversation with members of an Osage delegation that visited Paris in 1725 (Burns 2004: 362).
51. See Graeber 2011: 203–7.
52. Rousseau himself had fled home at an early age, writing to his Swiss watchmaker father that he aspired to live ‘without the help of others’.
53. Barruel 1799: 104. The quote is from an anti-Illuminati tract, claiming to be the ‘Code of the Illuminati’, and this whole discourse is so shrouded in rumour and accusation that we can’t even be entirely sure our sources didn’t just make it up; but in a way it hardly matters, since the main point is that the right wing saw Rousseauian ideas as inspiring leftist revolutionary activity.
54. It is not entirely clear whether ‘Illuminism’ as it came to be called was a revolutionary doctrine at all, since Weishaupt himself later denied it – after the society was banned and he was himself driven from Bavaria – and characterized it as purely reformist; but his enemies of course insisted these protests were disingenuous.
55. The key difference is that Rousseau sees progress as undermining an essentially benevolent human nature, while classic conservative thought tends to see it as having undermined traditional mores and forms of authority which had previously been able to contain the less benevolent aspects of human nature.
56. Certainly, there is a tendency, in all this literature, when introduced to unfamiliar societies, to treat them alternately as entirely good or entirely evil. Columbus was already doing this in the 1490s. All we’re saying here is that this does not mean that nothing they ever said had any bearing on the actual perspectives of those they encountered.
57. Chinard 1913: 186, translation following Ellingson 2001: 383. A similar passage: ‘Rebel against all constraints, all laws, all hierarchies, the baron Lahontan and his American savage are anarchists properly speaking. The Dialogues with a Savage are neither a political treatise nor a learned dissertation, they are the clarion call of a revolutionary journalist; Lahontan opens the way not just for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but for Father Duchesne and the modern socialist revolutionaries, and all that just ten years before the death of Louis XIV .’ (1913: 185, translation ours).
58. Ellingson 2001: 383.
59. The construction ‘our own’ of course presumes that Native Americans don’t read books, or those that do don’t matter.
60. Chinard 1913: 214.
61. ‘His imagination paints no pictures; his heart makes no demands on him. His few wants are so readily supplied, and he is so far from having the knowledge which is needful to make him want more, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity … His soul, which nothing disturbs, is wholly wrapped up in the feeling of its present existence, without any idea of the future, however near at hand; while his projects, as limited as his views, hardly extend to the close of day. Such, even at present, is the extent of the native Caribbean’s foresight: he will improvidently sell you his cotton-bed in the morning, and come crying in the evening to buy it again, not having foreseen he would want it again the next night.’ (Rousseau 1984 [1754]: 90).
62. ‘Fraternity’ might seem the odd man out here, at least insofar as Native American influences go – though a case can be made that it echoes the responsibility for mutual aid and support which American observers so often remarked on. Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws makes a great point of the sense of fraternal commitment among the Osage, and his book was a powerful influence on the political theorists of both the American and French Revolutions; as we’ll see in Chapter Eleven, Montesquieu himself appears to have met with an Osage delegation visiting Paris and his observations may be based on direct communication with them (Burns 2004: 38, 362).
63. In the sense that women controlled land and its produce and also most other productive resources, but men controlled most of the important political offices.
1. The authoritative account, well into the nineteenth century, was that of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, first published in 1650, though it is important to note that none other than Sir Isaac Newton proposed an alternative calculation, suggesting the actual date was 3988 BC .
2. The phrase we owe to Thomas Trautmann’s (1992) account of this ‘time revolution’. While the field of anthropology came into existence during the ‘decade of Darwin’ (i.e. between the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871), it was not actually Darwinism but archaeological excavations that established the timescale of human prehistory as we know it. Geology paved the way, replacing the biblically inspired view of earth’s genesis as a series of rapid titanic upheavals with a more mechanistic and gradual account of our planet’s origins. More detailed studies of the early development of scientific prehistory, and how fossil evidence and stone tools were first fitted into this expanded chronology of life on earth, can be found in Schnapp 1993 and Trigger 2006.
3. The key findings are summarized in Scerri et al. 2018. For an accessible account see also Scerri’s feature article in New Scientist, published online (25 April 2018) as ‘Origin of our species: why humans were once so much more diverse’.
4. The Sahara seems to have acted as a kind of turnstile for human evolution, periodically turning green and then dry again with the cyclical advance/retreat of monsoon rains, opening and shutting the gates of interaction between northern and southern parts of the African continent (see Scerri 2017).
5. Geneticists assume, reasonably enough, that a fair amount of genetic admixture did take place.
6. Green et al. 2010; Reich et al. 2010. Fossil evidence tells us that the first expansions of modern humans out of Africa began as far back as 210,000 years ago (Harvati et al. 2019), but these were often tentative and quite short-lived, at least until the more decisive radiations of our species began around 60,000 BC .
7. Recent and historical hunter-gatherers, as we shall see, present an enormous range of possibilities, from assertively egalitarian groups like the Ju/ ’hoansi of the Kalahari, the Mbendjele BaYaka of Congo or the Agta in the Philippines to assertively hierarchical ones like the populations of the Canadian Northwest Coast, the Calusa of Florida Keys or the forest-dwelling Guaicurú of Paraguay (these latter groups, far from being egalitarian, are known to have traditionally kept slaves and lived in ranked societies). Holding up any particular subset of recent foragers as representatives of ‘early human society’ is essentially a matter of picking cherries.
8. Hrdy 2009.
9. Will, Conard and Tryon 2019, with further references.
10. For important reviews and critiques of the ‘Human Revolution’ idea see McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Mellars et al. 2007.
11. The term ‘Venus figurine’ is still widely used, but has links to scientific racism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when direct comparisons were drawn between prehistoric images and the anatomy of modern individuals considered living specimens of humanity in its ‘primitive’ forms. A tragic example is the life story of Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited around Europe as a ‘freak’ owing to her large buttocks under the stage name ‘Hottentot Venus’. See Cook 2015.
12. Renfrew 2007.
13. The case against European exceptionalism was laid out by Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks in a key (2000) publication; and has since been supplemented by discoveries in South Asia (James and Petraglia 2005) and Africa (Deino et al. 2018).
14. Shipton et al. 2018.
15. Aubert et al. 2018.
16. Conceivably this included the making of cave art; Hoffmann et al. 2018.
17. Recent efforts to estimate the overall human population at the start of the Upper Palaeolithic (known as the Aurignacian period) suggest a mean figure of just 1,500 people for the whole of western and central Europe, which is remarkably low; Schmidt and Zimmermann 2019.
18. For the relationship between demographic density and enhanced cultural transmission in Upper Palaeolithic Europe see the (2009) arguments of Powell, Shennan and Thomas.
19. This is obviously only a last resort and usually extreme measures are employed to ensure it’s really called for: in rural Madagascar, for instance, when police were effectively absent, the usual rule was that one could only lynch such a person if his parents gave permission first – which was usually effective as a way to simply drive the person out of town. (D. Graeber, field observation.)
20. Boehm 1999: 3–4.
21. Initially, but as it turns out wrongly thought to be a boy and girl; for new genetic evidence on this point see Sikora et al. 2017.
22. Again, modern genetic studies of the group burial at Dolní Věstonice have confirmed the male identity of all three burials, which was previously in doubt; Mittnik 2016.
23. Evidence from these various sites is usefully summarized and evaluated in Pettitt 2011, with further references; and see also Wengrow and Graeber 2015.
24. See e.g. White 1999; Vanhaeren and D’Errico 2005. Inheritance is hardly the only possible explanation for the association of wealth with children: in many societies where wealth circulates freely (for instance, where it’s socially impossible to refuse a request to hand over one’s necklace or bracelet to an admirer), a lot of ornament ends up festooning children to keep it out of circulation. If elaborate ornaments were buried in part to take them out of circulation, so as not to create invidious distinctions, burying them with children might be the ideal way to accomplish this.
25. Schmidt 2006; and for a convenient digest see also https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/
26. As ventured by Haklay and Gopher 2020, based on geometrical regularities and correspondences found among the ground plans of some three large enclosures; but doubts remain, as their study does not take into account the complex and dynamic construction sequences that lie behind the enclosures, and compares building phases that are not strictly contemporaneous.
27. Acemoğlu and Robinson 2009: 679; and see also Dietrich et al. 2019; Flannery and Marcus 2012: 128–31.
28. For the monumental character of mammoth structures in their Ice Age settings see Soffer 1985; Iakovleva 2015: 325, 333. As we note below, current research by Mikhail Sablin, Natasha Reynolds and colleagues shows that the term ‘mammoth houses’ or ‘dwellings’ may well be misleading in some cases; in fact, the precise functions of these impressive structures may have varied considerably across regions and periods (see also Pryor et al. 2020). For the massive wooden enclosures as evidence of large, seasonal gatherings see Zheltova 2015.
29. Sablin, Reynolds, Iltsevich and Germonpré (manuscript in preparation; made available to us by courtesy of Natasha Reynolds).
30. Ibid.
31. In fact, even small children are typically far more imaginative than this, and as we all know spend a considerable part of their time constructing alternative roles and symbolic worlds to inhabit. Robert L. Kelly, in his magisterial survey of the ‘foraging spectrum’, offered a clear statement of the problem concerning the stereotyping of forager populations, urging a study of ‘hunter-gatherer prehistory in terms other than broad typological contrasts such as generalized versus specialized, simple versus complex, storing versus non-storing, or immediate versus delayed return’ (2013: 274). Still, we note that in the main part of his study Kelly himself maintains just such a broad dichotomy between ‘egalitarian’ and ‘non-egalitarian’ hunter-gatherers as distinct types of society with supposedly fixed internal characteristics (tabulated as a binary contrast between ‘simple versus complex’ forms; Kelly 2013: 242, table 9-1).
32. The British historian Keith Thomas, for instance, compiled a whole list of casual rejections of Christianity from medieval and Renaissance English sources. ‘The Bishop of Exeter complained in 1600 that in his diocese it was “a matter very common to dispute whether there be a God or not” … In Essex a husband-man of Bradwell-near-the-Sea was said to “hold his opinion that all things cometh by nature, and does affirm this as an atheist” … At Wing, Rutland, in 1633 Richard Sharpe was accused of saying “there is no God and that he hath no soul to save”. From Durham in 1635 came the case of Brian Walker who, when asked if he did not fear God, retorted that, “I do not believe there is either God or Devil; neither will I believe anything but what I see”: as an alternative to the Bible he commended “the book called Chaucer”’ (1978: 202). The difference of course is that while expressing such opinions among the Winnebago might make you a figure of fun, under the government of Queen Elizabeth or King James it could get you into serious trouble – as evidenced by the fact that we know most of these people because of trial documents.
33. Beidelman 1971: 391–2. The account assumes that prophets are male but there are documented cases of female prophets as well. Douglas Johnson (1997) provides the definitive history of Nuer prophets in the early twentieth century.
34. Lévi-Strauss 1967 [1944]: 61.
35. Lee and Devore 1968: 11. It’s worth noting, perhaps, that Lévi-Strauss offered a forlorn epilogue to Man the Hunter, which is not read any more.
36. Formicola (2007) surveys the evidence; and see also Trinkaus 2018; Trinkaus and Buzhilova 2018.
37. This is the general pattern (Pettitt 2011). Of course, it is not completely universal – the Romito dwarf, for example, does not seem to have been buried with grave goods.
38. Archaeologists have observed close spatial associations between large Upper Palaeolithic (Magdalenian) aggregation sites in the French Périgord and natural choke points or ‘bottlenecks’ along the Dordogne and Vézère such as fords or meanders: ideal locations for intercepting herds of reindeer on their seasonal migrations (White 1985). In northern Spain, the famous cave sites of Altamira and Castillo have long been identified as aggregation locales based on their topographical location and the preponderance of seasonal resources like deer, ibex and shellfish among the animal remains found there (Straus 1977). On the periglacial ‘mammoth steppe’ of Central Russia, spectacularly large settlements like Mezhirich and Mezin – with their mammoth-bone dwellings, fixed storage pits and abundant evidence of art and trade – were aligned on major river systems (Dnepr and Desna), which also channelled the annual north–south movements of steppe bison, horse, reindeer and mammoth (Soffer 1985). Similarly, the Pavlov Hills of southern Moravia, where Dolní Věstonice is located, once formed part of a narrow belt of forest-steppe, bridging the non-glaciated zones of eastern and western Europe (see contributions by Jiří Svoboda, in Roebroeks et al. 2000). Year-round habitation was certainly possible in some of these locations, but population densities are still likely to have fluctuated markedly between seasons. Recently, archaeologists have begun using more fine-grained analytical techniques – like the microscopic study of growth patterns in animal teeth and antlers, as well as measuring geochemical proxies of seasonal variation such as stable isotope ratios in animal remains – to determine the migration patterns and diets of hunted game (for a useful survey see Prendergast et al. 2018).
39. Lang et al. 2013; L. Dietrich et al. 2019 (grinding slabs, stone bowls, hand pounders, pestles and mortars are all found in impressive numbers at Göbekli Tepe); and see also O. Dietrich et al. 2012.
40. Parker Pearson (2012) provides a detailed survey and interpretation of the archaeology of Stonehenge, including the results of recent fieldwork. The argument for Neolithic aristocracy is based on close analysis and dating of human remains associated with different phases in the construction of Stonehenge, which prove consistent with the idea that the first stone circle was linked to a high-status cemetery, where the cremated remains of a nuclear family were placed around the start of the third millennium BC . Subsequent removals and rebuildings, including the incorporation of massive sarsen stones, were apparently linked to ongoing mortuary rituals, as the same family’s lineage presumably expanded in size and status over a period of centuries.
41. For the rejection of cereal-farming in prehistoric Britain during periods of megalithic construction see Stevens and Fuller 2012; for the seasonality of midwinter meat-feasting at Durrington Walls, as detected from tooth remains, see Wright et al. 2014.
42. Viner et al. 2010; Madgwick et al. 2019.
43. Of course, humans are not alone in this. Non-human primates, like chimpanzees and bonobos, also vary the size and structure of their groups on a seasonal basis according to the changing distribution of edible resources in what primatologists call ‘fission-fusion’ systems (Dunbar 1988). So too, in fact, do all sorts of other gregarious animals. But what Mauss was talking about and what we’re considering here is categorically different from this. Uniquely, for humans such alternations also involve corresponding changes in moral, legal and ritual organization. Not just strategic alliances, but entire systems of roles and institutions are liable to be periodically disassembled and reconstructed, allowing for more or less concentrated ways of living at different times of year.
44. Mauss and Beuchat 1979 [1904–5]. It’s worth noting that politics wasn’t the aspect of seasonal variations they themselves chose to emphasize, being more concerned with the contrast between secular and ceremonial arrangements and the effects this had on the self-consciousness of the group. E.g. ‘Winter is a season when Eskimo society is highly concentrated and in a state of continual excitement and hyperactivity. Because individuals are brought into close contact with one another, their social interactions become more frequent, more continuous and coherent; ideas are exchanged; feelings are mutually revived and reinforced. By its existence and constant activity, the group becomes more aware of itself and assumes a more prominent place in the consciousness of individuals.’ (p. 76)
45. It’s surely no coincidence that so much of Kwakiutl art plays visually on the relation of ‘name,’ ‘person’ and ‘role’ – relations laid open to scrutiny by their seasonal practices (Lévi-Strauss 1982).
46. Lowie 1948: 18.
47. ‘One does not find in these Plains military societies the germs of law and of the state. One finds that the germs have germinated and grown up. They are comparable, not antecedent, to our modern state and what would appear to be the important problem for study is not the investigation of how one grew out of the other, but what they have in common which might throw light on the nature of law and of the state.’ (Provinse 1937: 365)
48. Much of the rest of Lowie’s essay focuses on the role of chiefs, arguing that the power of political leaders over the ‘anarchic’ societies of the Americas was so carefully circumscribed as to exclude the emergence of permanent structures of coercion. Insofar as indigenous states developed there, he concluded, it could only have been through the power of prophecy: the promise of a better world, with religious figures claiming authority directly from the gods. A generation later, Pierre Clastres made almost exactly the same argument in his 1974 essay, Society Against the State . He follows Lowie so closely that he can only have been directly inspired. While Lowie is now largely forgotten, Clastres is remembered for arguing that stateless societies do not represent an evolutionary stage, innocent of higher organization, but are based on the self-conscious and principled rejection of coercive authority. Interestingly, the one element not carried over from Lowie to Clastres is that of seasonal variations in modes of authority; and this is despite the fact that Clastres himself focused largely on Amazonian societies, which did in fact have very different structures at different times of year (see Maybury-Lewis ed. 1979). A common and logical objection to Clastres’s argument, which remains hugely influential, is to ask how Amazonian societies could have consciously organized themselves against the emergence of forms of authority they’d never actually experienced. It seems to us that bringing seasonal variations back into the debate goes a significant way to resolving this dilemma.
49. Seasonal kings or lords like ‘John Barleycorn’ – a variant of the sacred ruler, destined to end his tenure and be killed each year at harvest time – are stock figures of British folklore to this day, but there is little agreement on how much further back they go beyond their earliest written mentions in the sixteenth century AD . The ubiquity of such ‘temporary kings’ in European, African, Indian, and Greco-Roman myth and legend was the subject of Book III in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which he called ‘The Dying God’.
50. Perhaps one reason why the published paper (Lowie 1948) has been forgotten is because of the distinctly uninspiring title: ‘Some aspects of political organisation among the American Aborigines’.
51. Knight 1991.
52. Discussed further by D. Graeber in ‘Notes on the politics of divine kingship: Or, elements for an archaeology of sovereignty’, in Graeber and Sahlins 2017, Chapter Seven.
53. On the ‘carnivalesque’ the classic text is Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (1940).
54. This is hardly the place to go into detail about the history of these debates, but it’s interesting to observe that they emerge directly from Mauss’s research on seasonality, which he carried out in co-ordination with his uncle, Émile Durkheim, who is considered the founder of French sociology in the same sense that Mauss is of French anthropology. In 1912, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim relied upon Mauss’s research on indigenous Australian societies to contrast what they described as the ordinary economic existence of Australian bands – concerned mostly with getting food – with the ‘effervescence’ of their seasonal gatherings, called corroboree . It was in the excitement of corroboree, he argued, that the power to create society appeared to them, as if it were an alien force projected into totemic spirits and their emblems. This was the first formulation of the basic problematic that almost all theorists have been forced to grapple with ever since: that rituals are simultaneously moments where social structure is manifested and moments of ‘anti-structure’ in which new social forms can pop up. British social anthropology, which took its initial theoretical inspiration primarily from Durkheim, worked through the problem in various ways (notably the work of Edmund Leach, Victor Turner or Mary Douglas). The most sophisticated, and to our minds compelling, proposals for how to resolve the dilemma are currently Maurice Bloch’s (2008) notion of the ‘transcendental’ versus ‘transactional’ realms; and Seligman et al.’s (2008) argument that ritual creates a ‘subjunctive’ or ‘as if’ domain of order, consciously set apart from a reality that is always seen in a contrasting light, as fragmented and chaotic. Ritual creates a world which is marked off as standing apart from ordinary life, but is also where essentially imaginary, ongoing institutions (like clans, empires, etc.) exist and are maintained.
55. As Peter Burke (2009: 283–5) notes, the idea that rituals of rebellion were simply ‘safety valves’ or ways of allowing common folk to ‘let off steam’ is first documented only two years after the invention of the steam engine – the favoured metaphor before that had been to let off the pressure in a wine cask. At the same time, though, medieval authorities were keenly aware of the fact that most peasant revolts or urban insurrections would begin precisely during such ritual moments. This ambivalence appears again and again. Rousseau already considered the popular festival to embody the spirit of revolution. Such ideas were later developed in Roger Caillois’s seminal essay on ‘the festival’, written for George Bataille’s Collège de Sociologie (transl. 2001 [1939]). It went through two drafts, the first holding forth the festival as a model of revolutionary social liberation, the second holding it forth as a harbinger of fascism.
1. Or at least broadly similar in form and function: specialists in prehistoric stone tool analysis, of course, spend a great deal of time differentiating specific ‘industries’ on the basis of fine-grained analysis, but even those who find themselves more ‘splitters’ than ‘lumpers’ would not deny the broad similarities of Upper Palaeolithic traditions – the Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, Hamburgian and so on – over very impressive geographical spans. For some recent discussion of the issues see Reynolds and Riede 2019.
2. Schmidt and Zimmerman 2019.
3. Bird et al. 2019; see also Hill et al. 2011.
4. This was one reason for the North Americans’ famous development of sign language. It is interesting that in either case, one is dealing with systems of totemic clans: raising the question of whether such systems are themselves typically forms of long-distance organization (cf. Tooker 1971). If nothing else, the common stereotype that ‘primitive’ peoples saw anyone outside their particular local group only as enemies appears to be entirely groundless.
5. Jordan et al. 2016; also Clarke 1978; Sherratt 2004.
6. We’ll see examples in the next chapter.
7. One can agree, for instance, with the arguments of James C. Scott (2017), that an affinity exists between grain economies and the interests of predatory elites imposing their authority through taxation, raiding and tribute (grain being an eminently visible, quantifiable, appropriable and storable resource). Nowhere, however, does Scott make the naive claim that taking up cereal-farming will in every case produce a state: he simply points out that, for these very pragmatic reasons, a majority of successful states and empires have chosen to promote – and often enforce – the production of a small number of grain crops among their subject populations, while similarly discouraging the pursuit of more chaotic, fluid and thus unmanageable forms of subsistence, such as nomadic pastoralism, garden cultivation or seasonal hunting and gathering. We will return to these issues in later chapters.
8. For basic texts: Woodburn 1982, 1988, 2005.
9. Leacock 1978; for a more extended argument, Gardner 1991.
10. JR 33: 49. When Lallemant says the Wendat had never known what it means to forbid something he presumably means by human law: they were, no doubt, familiar with ritual prohibitions of one sort or another.
11. By this we mean that their power was largely theatrical – though of course they also played a critical advisory role.
12. The way we are using the term here somewhat echoes Amartya Sen (2001) and Martha Nussbaum’s (2011) ‘Capability Approach’ to social welfare, which also speaks of ‘substantive freedoms’ as the ability to take part in economic or political activity, live to old age etc.; but we actually arrived at the term independently.
13. Gough 1971; see also Sharon Hutchinson 1996 for the full implications for women’s autonomy, taking matters down to post-colonial times.
14. Evans-Pritchard 1940: 182.
15. It is intriguing to note, in this regard, that all human languages have an imperative form; there are no people, even in radically anti-authoritarian societies like the Hadza, who are entirely unfamiliar with the idea of a command. Yet at the same time, many societies clearly arrange things in such a way that no one can give another person orders systematically.
16. It must be recalled in this context that Turgot was writing in the mid eighteenth century, so most of the criteria we use nowadays to justify the superiority of ‘Western civilization’ (a concept that did not exist at the time) clearly would not apply: European standards of hygiene and public health, for example, were appalling, much worse than prevailed among ‘primitive’ peoples of the time; Europe had no democratic institutions to appeal to, its legal systems were barbaric by world standards (e.g. Europeans were still imprisoning heretics and burning witches, something which happened almost nowhere else); standards of living and even de facto wage levels were lower than in India, or China, or under the Ottoman Empire or Safavid Persia until perhaps the 1830s.
17. The proposal that medieval European peasants worked fewer hours overall than contemporary American office workers was first, famously, made by the American sociologist Juliet Schor in The Overworked American (1991). It has been contested but appears to have stood the test of time.
18. It was based, in fact, on his own brief contribution to the Man the Hunter symposium two years before. The original essay has been reprinted in various editions of Sahlins’s collected essays under the overall title Stone Age Economics (most recently, Sahlins 2017).
19. The key studies relied on by Sahlins are gathered in Lee and Devore 1968. Earlier ethnographic work, by contrast, was hardly ever supported by statistical data.
20. Braidwood 1957: 22.
21. The concept of a Neolithic Revolution, now more often called the Agricultural Revolution, was introduced by the Australian prehistorian V. Gordon Childe in the 1930s, who identified the origins of farming as the first of three major revolutions in human civilization, the second being the Urban Revolution and the third the Industrial. See Childe 1936.
22. As we’ve seen in Chapter One, people do in fact still make this kind of claim quite routinely, but they do so in flagrant disregard of the evidence presented by Sahlins, Lee, Devore, Turnbull and many others, almost as if none of this research had ever been published.
23. This reading of Augustine is actually derived from Sahlins’s own later work (1996, 2008). At the time, of course, all this could only be informed speculation. Now new discoveries about the evolving relationship between people and crops are forcing us to revisit his thesis, as we’ll see in Chapters Six and Seven.
24. Sahlins 2017 [1968]: 36–7.
25. Codere 1950:19.
26. Oddly enough, Poverty Point is actually situated almost exactly midway between the Bayou Macon Wildlife Management Area and the Black Bear Golf Club.
27. We quote here from Kidder’s (2018) summary article. For a more extended, if somewhat idiosyncratic, account of Poverty Point archaeology see Gibson 2000; and for a wide-ranging assessment, Sassaman 2005.
28. As Lowie (1928) demonstrated, in more recent Amerindian societies it was usually ownership of these ‘incorporeal’ goods (which he compared to our patents and copyrights) that unlocked rights of usufruct over land and resources, rather than direct ownership of territory.
29. Clark 2004.
30. Gibson and Carr 2004: 7, here citing Sahlins’s ‘original affluent society’ on the matter of ‘simple, ordinary foragers’.
31. For which see also Sassaman 2005: 341–5; 2010: 56 ff.; Sassaman and Heckenberger 2004.
32. A special issue of the Society for American Archaeology’s magazine contains useful discussion of ‘Archaic’ shell-mound cultures in various parts of North America; see Sassaman (ed.) 2008. For evidence of prehistoric coastal fortifications, trade and warfare in British Columbia see Angelbeck and Grier 2012; Ritchie et al. 2016.
33. Sannai Maruyama, the largest and most impressive Jōmon site, was occupied between 3900 and 2300 BC, and lies in the Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan. Habu and Fawcett (2008) provide a lively account of the site’s discovery, reception and contemporary interpretation. For broader discussions of Jōmon material culture, settlement patterns and uses of the environment see Takahashi and Hosoya 2003; Habu 2004; Kobayashi 2004; Matsui and Kanehara 2006; Crema 2013. It’s worth noting that the ancient Jōmon have been infiltrating modern consciousness in other ways too: the distinctive ‘rope pattern’ aesthetics of their highly crafted ceramics provided the graphic template for one of Nintendo’s most popular video games, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild . Jōmon seems quite at home in the digital age.
34. In Europe, the term ‘Mesolithic’ refers to the history of fisher-hunter-gatherers after the Ice Age, including their first encounters with farming populations, which we’ll discuss in Chapter Seven. Some consider the Finnish ‘Giant’s Churches’ to have had a defensive function (Sipilä and Lahelma 2006), while others note their astronomical alignments and possible role in signifying the division of the year into four seasons, as per the much later medieval Nordic calendar. For the dating and analysis of the so-called Shigir Idol see Zhilin et al. 2018. And for Mesolithic burial traditions in Karelia and Europe’s Atlantic seaboard see Jacobs 1995; Schulting 1996.
35. Sassaman (ed.) 2008.
36. English edition of Lahontan (1735), p. 113.
37. Tully 1994. Locke’s position was repudiated by Chief Justice Marshall in 1823, in the case Johnson and Grahame’s Lesee v. McIntosh . But in some countries the related principle of terra nullius (‘land belonging to no one’) was revoked only much more recently, in Australia as recently as the 1992 ‘Mabo Decision’, which ruled that Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders did after all have their own distinct forms of land tenure before British colonization.
38. This is the argument of Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe (2014); whether or not one accepts this technical definition of farming, the strength of the evidence he presents is overwhelming, to show that indigenous populations were routinely working, cultivating and enhancing their territories, and had been for millennia.
39. Of course, the existence of past inequalities and exploitation doesn’t in any way weaken claims to title by indigenous groups, unless one wants to argue that only groups living in some imaginary State of Nature are worthy of legal compensation.
40. Marquardt 1987: 98.
41. Frank Cushing, of the Bureau of American Ethnology, was among the first to embark on a systematic study of the remains of Calusa society, which dwindled into obsolescence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cushing, even with the rudimentary archaeological methods of his time, reached conclusions that have been borne out by later research: ‘The development of the Key Dwellers in this direction, is attested by every Key ruin – little or great – built so long ago, yet enduring the storms that have since played havoc with the mainland; is mutely yet even more eloquently attested by every great group of the shell mounds on these Keys built for the chief’s houses and temples; by every lengthy canal built from materials of slow and laborious accumulation from the depths of the sea. Therefore, to my mind, there can be no question that the executive, rather than the social side of government was developed among these ancient Key Dwellers to an almost disproportionate degree; to a degree which led not only to the establishment among them of totemic priests and headmen, as among the Pueblos, but to more than this – to the development of a favoured class, and of chieftains even in civil life little short of regal in power and tenure of office.’ (Cushing 1896: 413; and for more recent accounts see Widmer 1988; Santos-Granero 2009).
42. For a summary of the evidence on Calusa subsistence and its socio-economic implications see Widmer 1988: 261–76.
43. Flew 1989.
44. Trouillot 2003.
45. Consider the reaction of Otto von Kotzebue, commander of a Russian ship called the Rurik, on first catching sight of the Sacramento River in November 1824: ‘The many rivers flowing through this fruitful country will be of greatest use to future settlers. The low ground is exactly adapted to the cultivation of rice; and the higher, from the extraordinary strength of the soil, would yield the finest wheat-harvests. The vine might be cultivated here to great advantage. All along the banks of the river grapes grow wild, in as much profusion as the rankest weeds: the clusters were large; and the grapes, though small, very sweet, and agreeably flavoured. We often ate them in considerable quantities, and sustained no inconvenience from them. The Indians also ate them voraciously.’ Cited in Lightfoot and Parrish 2009: 59.
46. Nabokov 1996: 1.
47. In Florida we find stone tools together with mastodon bones at least 14,000 years old (Halligan et al. 2016). Evidence for early coastal penetration into the Americas along the so-called ‘kelp highway’ is presented by Erlandson et al. 2007.
48. In a now classic discussion, Bailey and Milner (2002) laid out a powerful case for the central role of coastal hunter-gatherers in the evolution of human societies, between the Late Pleistocene and the Mid-Holocene, noting how changing sea levels have grossly distorted our conventional picture of early human demography, submerging a greater part of the evidence. The Tågerup promontory in western Scania, Sweden – and the wider region of southern Scandinavia – offer excellent examples of large scale and longevity in Mesolithic settlement, and for every such ancient coastal landscape that survives we must surely imagine hundreds more, long hidden below the waves (Larsson 1990; Karsten and Knarrström 2013).
49. For a more detailed analysis of the Natchez divine kingship see Graeber and Sahlins 2017: 390–95. We only know that the Great Sun’s power was so limited because when the French and English were competing for allies they found that each Natchez village adopted its own, often contradictory, foreign policy, regardless of what the Great Sun told them to do. If the Spanish had limited their dealings to the court, they might well have missed out entirely on this side of things.
50. Woodburn 2005: 26 (our emphasis). Nor, we should add, is it difficult to find other examples of free societies (for instance, in aboriginal California or Tierra del Fuego), where no adult would ever presume to give another a direct order, but where the one exception is during ritual masquerades when gods, spirits and ancestors who impose laws and punish infractions are presumed to be, somehow, present; see also Loeb 1927; also Sahlins’s essay on the ‘original political society’ which opens Graeber and Sahlins 2017.
51. See Turnbull 1985 for a description.
52. Women have to pretend they don’t know it’s really their own brothers and husbands, and so forth. No one quite knows whether the women really know (it seems they almost certainly do), whether the men really know the women know, whether the women know the men know they know, and so forth …
53. This is why, as MacPherson – our principal source here – notes in his Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962), negative rights make so much better sense to us than positive rights – that is, despite the fact that the UN Human Rights Charter guarantees everyone jobs and livelihood as basic human rights, no government is ever accused of a human rights abuse for throwing people out of work or removing subsidies on basic foodstuffs, even if it causes widespread hunger; but only for ‘trespass’ on their persons.
54. Consider here the way that indigenous land claims almost invariably involve invoking some notion of the sacred: sacred mountains, sacred precincts, earth mothers, ancestral burial grounds and so forth. This is precisely by way of opposing the prevailing ideology, where what is ultimately sacred is the freedom afforded by being able to make absolute, exclusive property claims.
55. Lowie 1928.
56. Walens 1981: 56–8 provides an elaborate analysis of Kwakiutl feast dishes, which are both corporeal and incorporeal property at the same time since they can die and be reincarnated.
57. Lowie 1928: 557; see also Zedeño 2008.
58. Fausto 2008; see also Costa 2017.
59. Costa and Fausto 2019: 204.
60. Durkheim 1915, Book Two, Chapter One: ‘The Principal Totemic Beliefs: the Totem as Name and Emblem’; see also Lévi-Strauss 1966: 237–44.
61. Strehlow 1947: 99–100.
62. As in so many examples of what we are calling ‘free societies’, maternal nurture sought to inculcate a sense of autonomy and independence; while male nurture – because the trials and ordeals of the Australian initiation ceremonies were, indeed, meant to complete a process of ‘growing up’ – was designed to ensure that, in those contexts at least, exactly the opposite instincts came to the fore. In this connection it’s worth noting that a considerable literature exists, starting from Barry, Child and Bacon (1959), which suggests, as Gardner put it, that ‘while non-foragers tend to push children towards obedience and responsibility, foragers tend to press for self-reliance, independence and individual achievement’ (1971: 543).
1. Indigenous population figures are highly contested, but there is agreement that the Pacific littoral was among the most densely populated regions of aboriginal North America; see Denevan 1992; Lightfoot and Parrish 2009.
2. In Kroeber’s magisterial Handbook of the Indians of California, he at one point remarks that ‘Agriculture had only touched one periphery of the State, the Colorado River bottom, although the seed-using and fairly sedentary habits of virtually all the other tribes would have made possible the taking over of the art with relatively little change of mode of life. Evidently planting is a more fundamental innovation to people used to depending on nature than it seems to those who have once acquired the practice’ (1925: 815), though elsewhere he duly acknowledges that a number of California peoples – ‘the Yurok, Hupa, and probably Wintun and Maidu’ – did in fact plant and grow tobacco (ibid: 826). So planting could not have been such a conceptual innovation after all. As Bettinger noted more recently, ‘that agriculture never managed to spread to California was not due to isolation. California was always in more or less direct communication with agriculturalists, whose products occasionally turn up in archaeological sites’ (2015: 28). He argues that Californians simply developed a ‘superior adaptation’ to the local environment; though this does not explain the systematic nature of the rejection.
3. Hayden 1990.
4. We still see this mindset to this day, of course: witness the endless fascination of journalists with the idea that somewhere on earth there must be some group of humans that could be said to have lived in untouched isolation since the Stone Age. In fact, no such groups exist.
5. This was admittedly not the only way to organize displays: most US museums before Boas organized objects by types: beadwork, canoes, masks, etc.
6. ‘Ethnology’ is today a minor sub-branch of anthropology, but in the early twentieth century it was regarded as the highest form of synthesis, bringing together the findings of hundreds of micro-studies to compare and analyse the connections and divergences among human societies.
7. This is surely understandable. Exponents of scientific racism took theories like the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ to new extremes, notably followers of the Austrian-German ‘culture-circle school’ (Kulturkreislehre), but equally many contemporary writings by French, Russian, British and American scholars. One particular interest of the culture-circle school of ethnology were the origins of monotheism, long considered a unique and seminal contribution of Jewish culture to Europe. The idea of studying an extraordinary variety of ‘herding cultures’, ‘shepherds’ and ‘cattle keepers’ was at least partly to show that there was nothing special about the religious achievements of the ancient Israelites, and that monotheistic beliefs about ‘High Gods’ were quite likely to crop up in almost any tribal society that spent much of its time moving with animals through arid or steppe landscapes. Published debates on this matter in the mid twentieth century could fill a small library, starting with Wilhelm Schmidt’s twelve-volume Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (The Origin of the Idea of God, 1912–55).
8. Wissler 1927: 885.
9. Hence E. B. Tylor, the founder of British anthropology, wrote that ‘though cat’s-cradle is now known over all western Europe, I find no record of it at all ancient in our part of the world. It is known in Southeast Asia, and the most plausible explanation seems to be that this is its centre of origin, whence it migrated westward into Europe, and eastward and southward through Polynesia and into Australia.’ (1879: 26). A JSTOR search for ‘string figures’ in anthropology journals between 1880 and 1940 yields 212 results, and forty-two essays with ‘string figures’ in the title.
10. Collected in Mauss 1968–9, and now also compiled and translated into English, with commentary and historical context, in Schlanger 2006.
11. Since the 1930s and 1940s anthropologists turned first to structural-functionalist paradigms, then later to others that focused more on cultural meanings, but in either case concluded that the historical origins of customs is not a particularly interesting question since it tells you almost nothing about what the meaning of the custom is today.
12. See Dumont 1992: 196.
13. This was, in some ways, closer to the kind of approach advocated in today’s research on how culture spreads, although the ultimate causes now tend to be sought in universal factors of human cognition (e.g. Sperber 2005).
14. Mauss, in Schlanger 2006: 44, and see also pp. 69, 137.
15. For a general overview and history of Northwest Coast peoples, ecology and material culture see Ames and Maschner 1999; for the equivalent in Aboriginal California see Lightfoot and Parrish 2009.
16. E.g. Hayden 2014.
17. Such broad-brush distinctions based on food preferences and resource availability were at the foundation of ‘culture areas’ when these were first defined by Clark Wissler and others in the early twentieth century. In The American Indian (1922), Wissler actually first defined ‘food areas’ and then subdivided them into ‘culture areas’. For more recent and critical views of these broad ecological classifications see Moss 1993; Grier 2017. It’s worth noting that the presence or absence of slavery never factors into the ‘culture areas’ described in Wissler’s influential book The American Indian (admittedly, chattel slavery was an unusual institution among the indigenous societies of North America, but it did exist).
18. Actually, he was speaking of a cluster of related peoples, primarily the Yurok, Karuk and Hupa, who shared very similar cultural and social institutions even though they spoke entirely unrelated languages. In the anthropological literature, the Yurok have often come to stand in for Californians in general (just as ‘Kwakiutl’ have come to stand in for all Northwest Coast peoples), which is unfortunate since, as we’ll see, they were in some ways quite unusual.
19. Goldschmidt 1951: 506–8. In fact, all this was unusual even for California: as we’ll see, most Californian societies used shell money, but a man or woman’s wealth was ritually destroyed at death.
20. Benedict 1934: 156–95. The comparison between Northwest Coast societies and the noble households of medieval Europe was explored by Claude Lévi-Strauss in a piece which is most famous for its definition of ‘house societies’, and is reprinted as part of his collected essays under the title ‘Anthropology and Myth’ (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 151; and see also Lévi-Strauss 1982 [1976]).
21. Hajda (2005) provides a fine-grained discussion of the different forms of slavery on the lower Columbia River and further north on the Northwest Coast, and how these developed in the early period of European contact (1792–1830). But she does not go into the wider contrast with indigenous societies south of Cape Mendocino, which rejected slavery altogether.
22. Sahlins 2004: 69.
23. Goldschmidt 1951: 513.
24. Drucker 1951: 131.
25. Elias 1969.
26. See Boas and Hunt 1905; Codere 1950. Ethnographers in the early twentieth century certainly regarded the occasional introduction of such practices into northern Californian societies as highly exotic and anomalous, as in Leslie Spier’s (1930) discussion of the Klamath, who took up slaving and limited aspects of potlatch after their adoption of the horse.
27. Powers 1877: 408; Vayda 1967; Goldschmidt and Driver 1940.
28. See, especially, Blackburn 1976: 230–35.
29. Chase-Dunn and Mann 1998: 143–4. Napoleon Chagnon (1970: 17–18) went so far as to argue that ‘it was functionally necessary for the Yurok to “desire” dentalia [i.e. money], but only if they were obtained from their neighbours. The social prestige involved with obtaining wealth in this fashion effected a more stable adaptation to the distribution of resources by allowing trade to be the alternative to raid in times of local insufficiency.’
30. See Donald 1997.
31. Ames 2008; cf. Coupland, Steward and Patton 2010.
32. The case for some form of social stratification in this early period was convincingly laid out in numerous pioneering works by the archaeologist Kenneth Ames (e.g. Ames 2001).
33. Arnold 1995; Ames 2008; Angelbeck and Grier 2012.
34. Santos-Granero 2009.
35. Patterson 1982; and thus, Goldman on Kwakiutl slaves: ‘captive aliens, they had no kinship connections with their new homes, and no genuine ties any longer with their original tribes and villages. As persons violently torn loose from their roots, slaves existed in a state equivalent to being dead. Being on the margins of death they were by Kwakiutl standards the proper sacrificial victims for cannibalistic feasts.’ (1975: 54)
36. Patterson 1982; Meillassoux 1996.
37. Santos-Granero 2009: 42–4.
38. See Wolf 1982: 79–82.
39. According to Santos-Granero, who has carefully compiled information about what raiders actually said they were doing.
40. Fausto 1999.
41. Santos-Granero 2009: 156. This does not appear to be a mere analogy: slaves in most Amazonian societies that kept them seem to have had the same formal status as pets; pets in turn were, as we already observed, seen as the paradigm for property more generally in much of Amazonia (see also Costa 2017). For instance, despite the kind treatment, a man or woman’s dogs, horses, parrots and slaves were typically all ritually sacrificed on their death (Santos-Granero, op. cit. : 192–4).
42. See also Graeber 2006. It is interesting in this connection that the Guaicurú, though they captured farmers, did not set those they took as slaves to work planting or tending crops, but integrated them into their own foraging lifestyle.
43. Powers 1877: 69.
44. They’d been among the first on the Pacific littoral to succumb to diseases introduced by traders and settlers. Combined with genocidal attacks, this caused the Chetco and nearby groups to suffer almost total demographic collapse in the nineteenth century. As a result, there are no detailed accounts of these groups to compare with the two major ‘culture areas’ of California and the Northwest Coast, which lie to either side of their former territories. Indeed, this complex subsector of the coast, between the Eel River and the mouth of the Columbia River, posed significant problems of classification for scholars seeking to delineate the boundaries of those culture areas, and the issue of their affiliation remains contentious today. See Kroeber 1939; Jorgensen 1980; Donald 2003.
45. The historicity of First Nations oral narratives concerning ancient migrations and wars on the Northwest Coast has been the subject of an innovative study which combines archaeology with the statistical modelling of demographic shifts that can be scientifically dated back to periods well over a millennium into the past. Its authors conclude that the ‘Indigenous oral record has now been subjected to extremely rigorous testing. Our result – that the [in this case] Tsimshian oral record is correct (properly not disproved) in its accounting of events from over 1,000 years ago – is a major milestone in the evaluation of the validity of Indigenous oral traditions.’ (Edinborough et al. 2017: 12440)
46. We cannot know how common such cautionary tales were because they are not the kind of stories early observers were likely to have recorded (this particular tale survived only because Chase believed the Wogies might have been shipwrecked Japanese!).
47. Spott and Kroeber 1942: 232.
48. Intriguingly, in some parts of California reliance on acorns as a dietary staple can be traced back some four millennia, long before the intensive exploitation of fish. See Tushingham and Bettinger 2013.
49. On the Northwest Coast, bulk harvesting of salmon and other anadromous species extends back to 2000 BC and remained a cornerstone of aboriginal economy until recent times. See Ames and Maschner 1999.
50. Suttles 1968.
51. Turner and Loewen 1998.
52. Take, for example, Joaquin Miller’s (1873: 373–4) description in his Life Amongst the Modocs, Unwritten History: ‘Here we passed groves of magnificent oak. Their trunks are five and six feet in diameter, and the boughs were then covered with acorns and fairly matted with mistletoe. Coming down to the banks of the Pit river, we heard the songs and shouts of Indian girls gathering acorns. They were up in the oaks and half covered with mistletoe. They would beat off the acorns with sticks, or cut off the little branches with tomahawks, and the older squaws gathered them from the ground, and threw them over their shoulders in baskets borne by a strap around the forehead.’ (He then goes off on an excursus about how Indian girls have exquisitely small and attractive feet, despite not wearing tight European-style shoes, thus exposing a ‘popular delusion’ among overweening mothers in frontier communities of the time: feet could be free, and still elegant.)
53. As Bettinger puts it, the acorn is ‘so very back-loaded that its capture as stores represents little saved time … with correspondingly less potential for developing inequality, likewise for attracting raiders or developing organizational means to defend or retaliate’ (2015: 233). His argument basically seems to be that what the remote ancestors of the Maidu, Pomo, Miwok, Wintu and other Californian groups sacrificed in short-term nutritional value they gained over the long term in food security.
54. Much of what we’ve presented in the preceding paragraphs is based on a more detailed argument by Tushingham and Bettinger (2013), but the basis of their approach – including the suggestion that forager slavery is rooted in the seasonal exploitation of aquatic resources – can be found in publications going all the way back to Herman Nieboer’s Slavery as an Industrial System (1900).
55. For a general reconstruction of traditional raiding practices on the Northwest Coast, and further discussion, see Donald 1997.
56. Drucker 1951: 279.
57. Golla 1987: 94.
58. Compare Ames 2001; 2008. Slaves could and often did attempt to escape as well, often successfully – especially when a number of slaves from the same community were held in the same place (see e.g. Swadesh 1948: 80).
59. There appears to have been something of a transitional zone on the lower reaches of the Columbia River where chattel slavery dwindled into various forms of peonage, while beyond stretched a largely slave-free zone (Hajda 2005); and for other limited exceptions see Kroeber 1925: 308–20; Powers 1877: 254–75; and Spier 1930).
60. MacLeod 1928; Mitchell 1985; Donald 1997.
61. Kroeber 1925: 49. Macleod (1929: 102) was unconvinced of this point, noting the existence of similar legal mechanisms among Tlingit and other Northwest Coast groups, which did not prevent the ‘subjection of foreign groups, tribute taking, and enslavement of captives’. Yet all sources concur that the only real slaves in Northwest California were debt-slaves, and that even these were few in number (cf. Bettinger 2015: 171). If not Kroeber’s then some other mechanism for the suppression of chattel slavery must have been at work.
62. Donald 1997: 124–6.
63. Goldschmidt 1951: 514.
64. Brightman 1999.
65. Boas 1966: 172; cf. Goldman 1975: 102.
66. Kan 2001.
67. Lévi-Strauss 1982.
68. Garth 1976: 338.
69. Buckley 2002: 117; cf. Kroeber 1925: 40, 107.
70. ‘The northwest is perhaps also the only part of California that knew slavery. This institution rested wholly upon an economic basis here. The Chumash may have held slaves; but precise information is lacking. The Colorado River tribes kept women captives from motives of sentiment, but did not exploit their labor.’ (Kroeber 1925: 834)
71. Loeb 1926: 195; Du Bois 1935: 66; Goldschmidt 1951: 340–41; Bettinger 2015: 198. Bettinger notes that (archaeologically visible) inequalities of wealth steadily declined after the introduction of dentalium in central California, and argues that the overall effect of the introduction of money appears to have been to limit debt relations, and thus reduce overall dependency and ‘inequality.’
72. Pilling 1989; Lesure 1998.
73. While captives taken in war were quickly redeemed, it seems that unlike in other parts of California, where tribal divisions assumed collective responsibility for doing so, here it was up to the individual family. Debt peonage seems to have resulted from inability to pay. Bettinger (2015: 171) suggests that this nexus of debt and warfare may partly explain the demographic fragmentation of Northwest Californian groups and break-up of collective groups to begin with, which were never very strong (totemic clans, for instance, were absent), but did exist further south. One early source (Waterman 1903: 201) adds that killers unable to pay compensation, but not forced into peonage, became a disgrace to their communities and retreated into isolation, often remaining there even after settling their debts. The overall situation did come to look a bit like a class system as men of inherited wealth often initiated wars, directed the peacemaking ceremonies that followed, and then managed the resulting debt arrangements – in the course of which one class of poorer household would fall into marginal status, its members scattering across the landscape and dissolving into patrilineal bands, while another concentrated as dependants around the victors. However, unlike the situation on the Northwest Coast, the degree to which grandees could compel their ‘slaves’ to work was decidedly limited (Spott and Kroeber 1942: 149–53).
74. As further argued in Wengrow and Graeber (2018), with subsequent comments by regional experts in the archaeology and anthropology of West Coast foragers and their descendants, and authors’ response.
1. Phaedrus 276B.
2. For the former opinion, see Detienne 1994, and for the latter, Piccaluga 1977.
3. From the children’s story Where the Wild Things Are (1963).
4. Mellaart 1967.
5. Our understanding of the site largely follows that developed by its recent excavator, Ian Hodder, except that we have emphasized the importance of seasonal variations in social structure to a greater degree. See Hodder 2006; and for further information, images and databases see also www.catalhoyuk.com, with references to multiple field reports, sections of which are also referred to below.
6. Meskell et al. 2008.
7. See, for example, Gimbutas 1982. More recent studies make the point that Gimbutas’s publications often inflated the frequency of female forms within Neolithic figurine assemblages, which on closer inspection contain a more balanced proportion of clearly female, clearly male, mixed or simply unsexed forms (e.g. Bailey 2017).
8. Charlene Spretnak (2011) discusses the successive waves of criticism levelled at Gimbutas and provides further references.
9. The key publication on the genomics of steppe migration is Haak et al. 2015. Shortly after these findings were published, the eminent prehistorian Colin Renfrew delivered a lecture at the University of Chicago entitled ‘Marija Rediviva [Marija Born Again]: DNA and Indo-European Origins’. He suggested that Gimbutas’s ‘kurgan hypothesis’ had been ‘magnificently vindicated’ by the findings of ancient DNA, which suggest links between the dispersal of Indo-European languages and the westward spread of the Yamnaya cultural complex from the steppe north of the Black Sea in the late fourth and early third millennia BC . It’s worth noting that these findings contradict Renfrew’s own (1987) hypothesis, that Indo-European languages originated in the region of Anatolia and spread, some millennia earlier, with the dispersal of Neolithic farming cultures. Other archaeologists, however, feel that the genomic data is still too coarse to permit talk of large-scale migrations, let alone establish links between biological inheritance, material culture and the spread of languages (for a detailed critique see Furholt 2018).
10. See here Sanday’s Women at the Center (2002). Sanday notes that Gimbutas rejects the term ‘matriarchy’ because she sees it as a mirror image of patriarchy, and therefore that it would imply autocratic rule or political dominance of women, and therefore prefers ‘matric’. Sanday notes that Minangkabau themselves use the English term ‘matriarchate’, employing it in a different sense (ibid.: 230–37).
11. See Hodder 2003; 2004; 2006, plate 22. For the most recently discovered statuette of an (elderly?) female in limestone see also Chris Kark’s short but informative item in Stanford News, ‘Archaeologists from Stanford find an 8,000-year-old “goddess figurine” in central Turkey’ (2016), including comments from key researchers.
12. For the occurrence in these regions of likely masked figurines, and the connections between figurines and other Neolithic depictions of masked human forms, see e.g. Belcher 2014: passim; Bánffy 2017.
13. Hodder 2006: 210, with further references.
14. Hodder and Cessford 2004.
15. Çatalhöyük actually comprises two main archaeological mounds. Everything we’ve been talking about so far applies to the early ‘East Mound’, while the ‘West Mound’ relates mainly to later periods of prehistory, beyond the scope of our discussion here.
16. Matthews 2005.
17. See Fairbairn et al. 2006.
18. Of the kind we discussed in Chapter Three.
19. Bogaard et al. 2014, with further references.
20. Arbuckle 2013; Arbuckle and Makarewicz 2009.
21. See Scheffler 2003.
22. In terms of environmental history, the upland regions of the Fertile Crescent fall within the Irano-Turanian bioclimatic zone. Current reconstructions suggest that the establishment of deciduous woodlands in this region did not follow directly from the onset of warmer and wetter conditions at the beginning of the Holocene, but was to a significant degree a product of landscape-management strategies carried out initially by forager populations, and subsequently by cultivators and herders (Asouti and Kabukcu 2014).
23. Based on the analysis of carbonized residues of wood found in archaeological sites, Asouti et al. (2015) reconstruct a moister environment for this region in the Early Holocene, with considerably more tree cover than is apparent today, especially along and adjacent to the Jordan Rift Valley. Towards the Mediterranean coast these lowland regions acted as refugia for wood- and grassland species, which survived continuously through the Last Glacial Maximum and into the Early Holocene.
24. Prehistorians have experimented with all kinds of different ways of classifying the Fertile Crescent into ‘culture areas’ or ‘interaction spheres’ corresponding to the main distinctions of the Late and Epi-Palaeolithic era, and the Early (or Pre-Pottery) Neolithic. The history of these various classifications is reviewed and evaluated by Asouti (2006). Here we follow the distinctions outlined by Sherratt (2007), which are based on the correlation of broad ecological and cultural patterns rather than isolated (and fairly arbitrary) categories of archaeological data, such as different ways of manufacturing stone tools and weapons. Sherratt’s classification also has the advantage of avoiding teleological tendencies found in some other studies, which assume all evidence of cultural complexity (such as substantial settlements and architecture) must be in some way related to the development of food production; in other words, he allows for such developments within foraging societies that had no strong investment in the domestication of plants and animals.
25. For craft specialization in Early Neolithic communities see Wright et al. 2008; and, in general, Asouti and Fuller 2013.
26. Sherratt 1999.
27. Willcox 2005; 2007.
28. For western Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan see Zeder and Hesse 2000; and for eastern Anatolia see Peters et al. 2017.
29. Asouti and Fuller 2013: 314–23, 326–8.
30. Harari 2014: 80.
31. Hillman and Davies 1990.
32. Maeda et al. 2016.
33. The initial growth of permanent villages – between 11,000 and 9500 BC – may have had much to do with a temporary return of glacial weather conditions (known as the ‘Younger Dryas’ episode) after the end of the last Ice Age obliging foragers in the lowland parts of the Fertile Crescent to commit to well-watered locations (Moore and Hillman 1992).
34. This conclusion is based on a combination of genetic and botanical data from samples recovered in archaeological excavations, as explained further below; and for a summary, see Fuller 2010; Fuller and Allaby 2010.
35. See Willcox et al. 2008; Willcox 2012.
36. Fuller 2007; 2010; Asouti and Fuller 2013, with further references.
37. Cf. Scott 2017: 72.
38. In fact, they did not even wish it on their slaves.
39. As proposed by Fuller 2010: 10; see also Fuller et al. 2010.
40. The significance of flood-recession cultivation for the origins of farming was first pointed out in a seminal (1980) article by Andrew Sherratt; republished and updated in Sherratt 1997.
41. Cultivation systems of this kind have been pursued up until recent times in rural India and Pakistan, and also in the American Southwest. As one geographer observed of Pueblo cultivation in New Mexico: ‘The kinds of places suitable for farming under the system … have existed from the time of prehistoric settlement; but cultivation, by its disturbance of the surface, leads to washing and channelling, which temporarily or permanently ruin a field. Thus, at the same site the best places to plant are limited in area and changeable in position. The Indians of the present day, like their prehistoric ancestors, hardly disturb the ground, as they do not plough but merely insert the seed in a hole made with planting stick … Even with the use of their methods fields must be periodically abandoned for later reoccupation. One of the principal causes of such shifts in location lies in the habits of ephemeral streams in the stage of alluviation.’ (Bryan 1929: 452)
42. For which see Sanday 1981, especially her Chapter Two: ‘Scripts for Male Dominance’.
43. Diamond 1987.
44. See Murdock 1937; Murdock and Provost 1973.
45. Owen 1994; 1996.
46. Barber 1991; 1994.
47. Soffer et al. 2000.
48. Lévi-Strauss 1966: 269.
49. See MacCormack and Strathern (eds) 1980.
50. We find ourselves reminded of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch (1998), where she showed how, in Europe, such ‘magical’ approaches to production came to be associated not just with women but with witchcraft. Federici argues that the elimination of such attitudes was essential for the establishment of modern (male-dominated) science, and also for the growth of capitalist wage labour: ‘This is how we must read the attack against witchcraft and against that magical view of the world which, despite the best efforts of the Church, had continued to prevail on a popular level through the Middle Ages … In this perspective … every element – herbs, plants, metals, and most of all the human body – hid virtues and powers peculiar to it … From palmistry to divination, from the use of charms to sympathetic healing, magic opened a vast number of possibilities … Eradicating these practices was a necessary condition for the capitalist rationalisation of work, since magic appeared as an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work … “Magic kills industry,” lamented Francis Bacon, admitting that nothing repelled him so much as the assumption that one could obtain results with a few idle experiments, rather than with the sweat of one’s brow.’ (Federici 1998: 142)
51. Lévi-Strauss 1966: 15.
52. Wengrow 1998; 2003; and for the evolution of Neolithic counting devices, and its relationship to the invention of script, see also Schmandt-Besserat 1992.
53. Vidale 2013.
54. Schmidt 2006; Köksal-Schmidt and Schmidt 2010; Notroff et al. 2016. A stone figure known to archaeologists as the ‘gift bearer’ also carries a human head to some unknown destination. Images of many of these sculptures and other finds from Göbekli Tepe can be found at https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/
55. Schmidt 1998; Stordeur 2000, fig. 6.1, 2.
56. O. Dietrich et al. 2019.
57. Which is not to say that such evidence for violent conflict is entirely lacking either. The largest preserved sample of human remains from any Early Holocene site in the Middle East comes from the site of Körtik Tepe, which lies northeast of Göbekli Tepe on a bank of the Upper Tigris, twelve miles from the modern town of Batman, firmly within the upland sector of the Fertile Crescent. Remains of more than 800 individuals have been recovered from the site, of which the 446 individuals so far analysed reveal high rates of skeletal trauma (of 269 skulls, some 34.2 per cent showed signs of cranial injury, including two female skulls with penetrative depressed fractures; post-cranial injuries were found on over 20 per cent of the individuals studied, including three cases of healed parry fractures to the forearm). Given the absence of other signs of warfare, this evidence has been explained – perhaps not altogether persuasively – in terms of interpersonal violence within a community of settled hunter-fisher-gatherers living in a region of abundant wild resources. A significant number of the human remains recovered from Körtik Tepe were subject to post-mortem modification, including the presence of cut marks on human crania, although none of these can be definitively linked to scalping or the taking of trophy heads (as reported by Erdal 2015).
58. Faunal and botanical remains from Çayönü Tepesi reveal a flexible economy which underwent numerous changes over a period of some 3,000 years. In the earlier phases of the site, which concern us here, its inhabitants made extensive use of wild pulses and nuts, as well as peas, lentil and bitter vetch, with smaller amounts of wild cereals. Cultivation of at least some of these crops is likely, but there is no clear evidence of plant domestication until the later phases of the site. Animal remains suggest its inhabitants pursued mixed herding and hunting strategies which varied over many centuries, including at times a strong reliance on pigs and wild boar, as well as sheep, cattle, gazelle and red deer, and also smaller game such as hares (see Pearson et al. 2013, with further references).
59. For the House of Skulls and the analysis of associated human remains at Çayönü Tepesi see Özbek 1988; 1992; Schirmer 1990; Wood 1992; also Kornienko’s (2015) broader review of evidence for ritual violence in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Isotopic analysis of human remains indicates that the individuals whose remains came to be stored in the Skull Building had significantly different diets to those buried elsewhere on the site, which might indicate local differences of status (Pearson et al. 2013), or conceivably the incorporation of outsiders into local mortuary rituals.
60. Allsen (2016) provides a sweeping account of the practical and symbolic relationships between hunting and monarchy in Eurasian history, which are remarkably consistent from the Middle East to India, Central Asia and China, and from antiquity down to the time of the British Raj.
61. Gresky et al. 2017.
62. No doubt these contrasts could also be found within the societies themselves; the key difference lies in how these various styles of technical activity were valued, and which were selected as the basis of artistic and ritual systems. For the overall absence of gender hierarchy in Early Neolithic societies of the southern Levant, and evidence for women’s participation on equal terms in ritual and economic activities, see also Peterson 2016.
63. Kuijt 1996; Croucher 2012; Slon et al. 2014.
64. Santana 2012.
65. Confronted with objects they can’t explain, archaeologists often turn to ethnographic analogies. Among the cases considered here is that of the Iatmul of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, a people who practised skull decoration until quite recent times. For the Iatmul, the making of skull portraits was intimately linked to head-hunting. Generally, it began by taking enemy heads in warfare, and was exclusively performed by men. The head of a defeated enemy was honoured by decorating it with clay, pigments, hair and shell. Once transformed, it was then cared for and ‘fed’ alongside other skulls in a special men’s house (Silverman 2001: 117 ff.). This case is important, because it shows how ancestor veneration and the violent taking of heads in conflict may, in some cases, form part of the same ritual system. In 2008 the social anthropologist Alain Testart published an article in the journal Paléorient arguing that similar things must have been going on among Neolithic societies in the Middle East, and archaeologists had missed the obvious connection between skull portraits and head-hunting. That prompted an outpouring of responses from archaeologists in the same journal, many indignant, pointing out the lack of evidence for warfare among those same communities, and even proposing that skull-modelling was a ritual strategy for promoting peaceful and egalitarian relations among Neolithic villagers (as first argued by Kuijt 1996). What we are suggesting here is that both parties to the debate were, in a sense, correct; but that they were really talking at cross purposes; or rather about different sides of the same coin. On the one hand, we should acknowledge mounting evidence that predatory violence (including the display of trophy skulls) was at least ritually and symbolically important among foragers in the northern (upland) part of the Fertile Crescent. Equally, we might consider if skull portraits (or ‘plastered skulls’) represent an inversion of such values in the more southerly (lowland) parts of the region. Not everything has to fit the same model, just because it was happening at the same time, and in this case just the opposite seems likely to be true.
66. Clarke 1973: 11.
1. For spectacular developments in stone vessel and bead production in the upper valley of the Tigris see Özkaya and Coşkun 2009.
2. Elinor Ostrom (1990) offers a range of field studies and historical examples, as well as formal economic models for the collective management of shared natural resources; but the basic point was already widely noted in earlier studies, some of which we cite below.
3. Georgescu-Roegen 1976: 215.
4. Periodic repartition of land at the local level was also discussed in O’Curry’s On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish (1873), and in Baden-Powell’s famous treatise on The Indian Village Community (1896). See, more recently, Enajero 2015.
5. Palestinian villages under Ottoman and British rule practised annual redistribution of communal grazing and farming lands under masha’a tenure, whereby owners of adjacent plots pooled resources to complete labour-intensive tasks such as ploughing, seeding, weeding and harvesting, responding to annual fluctuations in rainfall (Atran 1986). In Bali, irrigated rice-farming traditionally operated through a system of elected ‘water committees’. Local representatives attend temple meetings, where access to land and water is negotiated annually on a consensual basis (Lansing 1991). Other examples of sustainable land management under some form of communal organization can be found in the recent histories of Sri Lanka (Pfaffenberger 1998), and also Japan, for instance (Brown 2006).
6. Fuller 2010, with further references.
7. Diamond 1997: 178.
8. Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982; Bettinger 2015: 21–8.
9. For a review of how such processes played out in various parts of the world see Fuller and Lucas 2017. None of this is to deny the fact that crops frequently ‘got around’ various parts of the Old World, and often on a surprising scale, as with the westward transfer of Chinese millets to the Indus, mirrored by the eastward dissemination of western/central Asian bread wheat to China around 2000 BC . But efforts (notably by Jones et al. 2011) to characterize such early crop transfers as precursors to the ‘Columbian exchange’ of the sixteenth century AD (see below) are misplaced, since they ignore a number of important contrasts. These are spelled out by Boivin, Fuller and Crowther (2012), who note that early crop transfers in Eurasia took place within a ‘long-term, slow-growing network of connections and exchanges’ over many millennia, often initially in small and experimental quantities, and driven not by centres of urban expansion but by highly mobile and often small-scale intermediary groups such as the mounted pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe or the maritime nomads of the Indian Ocean. It was precisely this slow millennial history of cultural exchange and gene-flow between Eurasian species that prevented the kind of major ecological ruptures which occurred once those same species were unleashed upon the Americas and Oceania.
10. Crosby 1972; 1986.
11. See Richerson, Boyd and Bettinger 2001.
12. Recent estimates for the population of the Americas before Europeans landed in 1492 are around 60 million. The figure of 50 million lost hectares of arable land is calculated on the basis of a land use per capita model, in the key study by Koch et al. 2019.
13. For eustatic changes in sea levels at the Late Pleistocene to Holocene transition see Day et al. 2012; Pennington et al. 2016; and for the role of anthropogenic activities in altering terrestrial species’ distributions over the same time period Richerson et al. 2001; Boivin et al. 2016.
14. See Bailey and Milner 2002; Bailey and Flemming 2008; Marean 2014.
15. Boivin et al. 2016, with further references.
16. Clarke’s (1978) Mesolithic Europe: The Economic Basis remains a foundational study of these processes; for a more up-to-date (and global) overview see Mithen 2003; and also Rowley-Conwy 2001; Straus et al. (eds) 1990.
17. Bookchin 1982. In adopting the title of Bookchin’s landmark volume on social ecology, we cannot follow his own ideas about human prehistory or the origins of agriculture, which are based on information that is now many decades out of date. We do, however, find much to learn much from his basic insight: that human engagements with the biosphere are always strongly conditioned by the types of social relationships and social systems that people form among themselves. The mutual differentiation of forager ecologies on the American West Coast, discussed in Chapter Five, would be another excellent example of the same principle.
18. As the anthropologist Eric Wolf once put it.
19. Bruce Smith (2001) discusses the whole phenomenon under the rubric of ‘low level food production’, which he takes to describe economies that occupy ‘the vast and diverse middle ground between hunting-fishing-foraging and agriculture’.
20. Wild et al. 2004; Schulting and Fibiger (eds) 2012; Meyer et al. 2015; see also Teschler-Nicola et al. 1996.
21. For a broad account of the spread of Neolithic farming to Europe, understood through behavioural ecology and theories of cultural evolution, see Shennan 2018.
22. Coudart 1998; Jeunesse 1997; Kerig 2003; van der Velde 1990.
23. Shennan et al. 2013; and see also Shennan 2009; Shennan and Edinborough 2006.
24. Haak et al. 2005; 2010; Larson et al. 2007; Lipson et al. 2017.
25. Zvelebil 2006; and for evidence of status differences marked by wealth in Mesolithic cemeteries see O’Shea and Zvelebil (1984) on cemeteries from the region of Karelia; Nilsson Stutz (2010) on southern Scandinavia; and Schulting (1996) on the Breton coast.
26. Kashina and Zhulnikov 2011; Veil et al. 2012.
27. Schulting and Richards 2001.
28. Golitko and Keeley (2007) envisage hostile encounters between Neolithic farmers and more established Mesolithic populations, noting that fortified villages tend to cluster around the fringes of Neolithic colonization.
29. Wengrow 2006, Chapters Two to Three; Kuper and Kroepelin 2006.
30. Wengrow et al. 2014, with further references.
31. See Spriggs 1997; Sheppard 2011.
32. Denham et al. 2003; Golson et al. (eds) 2017; see also Yen 1995.
33. See Spriggs 1995; the Lapita habit of leapfrogging established populations into empty spaces may be partially confirmed by the findings of ancient DNA, for which: Skoglund et al. 2016.
34. Kirch 1990; Kononenko et al. 2016. Gell (1993) provides a systematic, comparative study of regional traditions of body art and tattooing in more recent Polynesian societies, and their social and conceptual permutations.
35. Holdaway and Wendrich (eds) 2017.
36. As we noted, Lapita is associated with the dispersal of Austronesian languages. Correlations between the spread of farming and language also seem likely for Nilotic cultures (and the much later Bantu expansion from western to southern Africa). For a general consideration of these and other cases of language-farming dispersal see Bellwood 2005; Bellwood and Renfrew (eds) 2002. An association between Indo-European and the spread of Early Neolithic farming in Europe is now considered unlikely (see Haak et al. 2015, with further references).
37. Capriles 2019.
38. Fausto 1999; Costa 2017.
39. Descola 1994; 2005.
40. Roosevelt 2013.
41. Hornborg 2005; Hornborg and Hill (eds) 2011.
42. ‘Complex’ being the operative word here – the indigenous arts of Amazonia are incredibly rich and diverse, with many regional and ethnic variations. Analysts have, nonetheless, found similar principles at work in visual culture over surprisingly large regions. For a Brazilian perspective see Lagrou 2009.
43. Erickson 2008; Heckenberger and Neves 2009; Heckenberger et al. 2008; Pärssinen et al. 2009.
44. Lombardo et al. 2020.
45. Piperno 2011; Clement et al. 2015; see also Fausto and Neves 2018.
46. Arroyo-Kalin 2010; Schmidt et al. 2014; Woods et al. (eds) 2009.
47. Scott 2009.
48. Smith 2001.
49. Evidence derives from archaeological sites in the valley of Mexico’s Rio Balsas; Ranere et al. 2009.
50. Smith 2006.
51. Fuller 2007: 911–15.
52. Redding 1998. Such ‘flirtations’ probably took the form of selective herd management with husbandry limited to females, allowing the males to roam wild.
53. In the archaeological phase termed Pre-Pottery Neolithic C (PPNC ).
54. Colledge et al. 2004; 2005. It’s important to note that a decline in crop diversity may have commenced within the Fertile Crescent, at roughly the time when the Neolithic farming package was carried north and west towards Europe, via Turkey and the Balkans. By around 7000 BC (the end of the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period) average crop diversity at sites in the Fertile Crescent had dropped from ten or eleven original founder crops to a mere five or six. Interestingly, what followed in this region (during the PPNC period) was a downturn in population, associated with the abandonment of large villages and the beginning of a more dispersed pattern of human settlement.
55. See also Bogaard 2005.
1. E.g. Dunbar 1996; 2010.
2. Dunbar 1996: 69–71. The cognitive basis of Dunbar’s Number is inferred from comparative studies of non-human primates, which suggest a correlation between neocortex size and group size in various species of monkeys and apes (Dunbar 2002). The significance of those findings for primate studies is not in question here, only whether they can be extended in any simple or direct way to our own species.
3. Bird et al. 2019; see also Hill et al. 2011; Migliano et al. 2017.
4. Sikora et al. 2017.
5. Bloch 2013.
6. Anderson 1991.
7. See Bird et al. 2019; and compare Bloch 2008.
8. Fischer 1977: 454.
9. See especially Childe 1950.
10. We hope to treat the rich African material, outside ancient Egypt, more fully in future work, along with many other valuable cases that could not be included here, such as the Pueblo traditions of the American Southwest, to name but one. For important existing discussions of African material, which bear out a number of our observations about the decentralized and self-organizing nature of early cities, see e.g. S. McIntosh 2009; R. McIntosh 2005.
11. Most archaeologists are generally happy to call any densely inhabited settlement over around 150 hectares, or certainly over 200 hectares, in size a ‘city’ (see, for example, Fletcher 1995).
12. Fleming 2009: passim .
13. For direct evidence of in-migration to Teotihuacan, based on isotopic studies of human remains, see White et al. 2008; for similar evidence at Harappa see Valentine et al. 2015. For a general discussion of neighbourhoods and their role in the formation of early cities, Smith 2015.
14. Plunket and Uruñuela 2006.
15. Day et al. 2007; Pennington et al. 2016.
16. See Pournelle 2003.
17. Sherratt 1997; Styring et al. 2017.
18. See Pournelle 2003; Scott 2017.
19. For China see Underhill et al. 2008; for Peru see Shady Solis, Haas and Creamer 2001.
20. Inomata et al. 2020. They key site here is in Tabasco State, and goes by the name Aguada Fénix. Dated between 1000 and 800 BC, it’s now recognized as the ‘oldest monumental construction ever found in the Maya area and the largest in the entire pre-Hispanic history of the region’. Aguada Fénix is by no means an outlier. Massive architectural features, implying communal labour on the scale of ancient Egyptian pyramids, have now been found at numerous sites in the Maya lowlands, many centuries before the inception of Classic Maya kingship. Mostly these comprise not pyramids but earthen platforms of staggering proportions and horizontal extent, carefully laid out in roughly E-shaped formations; their function remains unclear, as most of these sites were revealed by remote sensing (using LiDAR technology) and are yet to be excavated on any scale.
21. Anthony 2007.
22. Much of this research (published exclusively in Russian) was cutting-edge by the standards of the time, including aerial photography, subsurface prospection and careful excavation. For summaries and descriptions in English see Videiko 1996; Menotti and Korvin-Piotrovskiy 2012.
23. Shumilovskikh, Novenko and Giesecke 2017. What distinguishes these soils, in physical terms, is their high humus content and capacity for storing moisture.
24. Anthony 2007: 160–74.
25. To get a sense of relative scale, consider that just this vacant centre of a mega-site alone could have contained a large Neolithic town such as Çatalhöyük more than twice over.
26. Scientific dating shows that some of the largest known mega-sites were contemporaneous; Müller et al. 2016: 167–8.
27. Ohlrau et al. 2016; Shumilovskikh, Novenko and Giesecke 2017.
28. Nebbia et al. (2018) present evidence in support of this extreme seasonal model, while leaving room for other possibilities.
29. The people of the mega-sites had a tradition of deliberately burning their houses, which complicates matters for modern analysts, trying to ascertain how much of each site was in use simultaneously. It’s not known why this burning was done (for ritual purposes, or hygiene, or both?). Did it take place routinely within settlements, so part of the mega-site was living and growing, with the other part lingering on as a sort of ‘house-cemetery’? Ordinarily, careful modelling of high-precision radiocarbon dates would allow archaeologists to resolve such issues. Frustratingly, in this case, an anomaly in the calibration curve for the fourth millennium BC is preventing them from doing so.
30. Kirleis and Dal Corso 2016.
31. Chapman and Gaydarska 2003; Manzura 2005.
32. One should also allow for different answers, varying from one mega-site to another. For example, some of them, such as Maidenetske and Nebelivka, mobilized their populations to dig perimeter ditches, marking out a garden space between the outer circuit of houses and the edge of the settlement. Others, such as Taljanky, did not. It is worth stressing that these ditches cannot possibly have functioned as fortifications or defences of any kind – they were shallow, with frequent gaps so that people could come and go. It’s worth stressing this, because earlier scholarship often viewed the mega-sites as ‘refuge towns’ formed for the defence of a local population, a view that has now been largely abandoned in the absence of any clear evidence for warfare or other forms of conflict (see Chapman 2010; Chapman, Gaydarska and Hale 2016).
33. Bailey 2010; Lazarovici 2010.
34. As John Chapman and colleagues show, there is nothing in these assembly houses to suggest they housed a political or religious upper class: ‘Those expecting the architectural and artefactual reflections of a hierarchical society with elites ruling over thousands of inhabitants in the Trypillia mega-site will be disappointed.’ (Chapman, Gaydarska and Hale 2016: 120). Aside from their scale, and sometimes an accentuated entranceway, these buildings are similar in their furnishings to ordinary dwellings, except for the interesting absence of installations for the preparation and storage of food. They have ‘none of the depositional characteristics of a ritual or administrative centre’ (ibid.), and do not seem to have been permanently occupied on any scale, which supports the idea that they were used for periodic, perhaps seasonal gatherings.
35. Chapman, Gaydarska and Hale 2016.
36. The Basque system of settlement organization is described by Marcia Ascher in Chapter Five of her book Mathematics Elsewhere (2004). We cannot do justice to the subtleties of Ascher’s account here or the mathematical insight she brings, and refer interested readers to her study and to the original ethnographic material she relies on (Ott 1981).
37. Ascher 2004: 130.
38. As one of their leading excavators, the prehistorian Johannes Müller (2016: 304) puts it: ‘The new and unique character of spatial organization in Late Trypillia [or ‘Tripolye’] mega-sites displays some insights into human and group behaviour which might still be relevant for us today. Both the ability of non-literate societies to agglomerate in huge population groups under rural conditions of production, distribution, and consumption and their ability to avoid unnecessary social pyramids and instead practice a more public structure of decision making, reminds us of our own possibilities and abilities.’
39. Heartland of Cities was the title of a landmark archaeological survey and analysis of the central Mesopotamian floodplain by Robert McCormick Adams (1981).
40. The marshes of southern Iraq are home to the Ma‘dān (sometimes called Marsh Arabs), best known to Europeans through the writings of Wilfred Thesiger. The marshes were systematically drained by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath government in an act of political retribution, leading to the mass displacement of the indigenous population, and enormous damage to this ancient habitat. Since 2003 there have been sustained and partially successful efforts to reconstitute the marshes and their ancestral communities and ways of life.
41. Oates et al. 2007. Key evidence is in Syria, where military conflict has interrupted archaeological work at sites like Tell Brak, on the Khabur River (a major tributary of the Euphrates). Archaeologists call these grasslands in northern Mesopotamia the ‘dry-farming’ zone, because agriculture based on rainfall was possible there. The contrast is with southern Mesopotamia, an arid zone, where irrigation from the major rivers was mandatory for cereal-farming.
42. These mounds are the great material accretions of human life and death known by the Arabic word tell, built up through successive foundation and collapse of mud-brick architecture over tens or often hundreds of generations.
43. For a survey of ‘the Sumerian world’ see Crawford (ed.) 2013.
44. This also fitted rather well with British colonial concerns in the modern region they called ‘Mesopotamia’ which were based on a policy of elevating (and occasionally creating) local monarchies favourable to their own interests (see Cannadine 2001).
45. See Dalley 2000.
46. Wengrow 2010: 131–6; Steinkeller 2015. Scribes sometimes used another word (bala) – meaning ‘term’ or ‘cycle’ – to refer to corvée labour and also the succession of royal dynasties, but this is a later development. It is interesting to compare the whole phenomenon with the Malagasy fanompoana or ‘service’, a theoretically unlimited labour duty owed to the monarchy; in this case the monarch’s own family was exempt, but there are similar accounts of the absolute equality of everyone who came together to dig earth on royal projects and the cheerful enthusiasm with which they did so (Graeber 2007a: 265–7).
47. Steinkeller 2015: 149–50.
48. Written evidence from various periods of Mesopotamian history shows that rulers quite routinely proclaimed debt amnesties on jubilees and other festive occasions, wiping the slate clean for their subjects and allowing them to resume a productive civic life. Redemption of accrued debts, either by royal proclamation or in ‘years of forgiveness’, made good fiscal sense. It was a mechanism for restoring balance to the economy of Mesopotamian cities, and by releasing debtors and their kin from servitude it allowed them to continue living productive civic lives (see Graeber 2011; Hudson 2018).
49. Women were citizens and owned land. Some of the earliest stone monuments from anywhere in Mesopotamia record transactions between male and female owners, who appear as legal parties on an equal footing. Women also held high rank in temples, and female royals trained as scribes. If their husbands fell into debt they could become acting heads of households. Women also formed the backbone of Mesopotamia’s prolific textile industry, which financed its foreign trade ventures. They worked in temples or other large institutions, often under the supervision of other women, who received land allotments in similar proportions to men. Some women were independent financial operators, issuing credit to other women; see, in general, Zagarell 1986; van de Mieroop 1989; Wright 2007; Asher-Greve 2012. Some of the earliest documentation on these matters comes from Girsu, in the city-state of Lagash, around the middle of the third millennium BC . It comprises some 1,800 cuneiform texts derived mostly from an institution named ‘the House of the Woman’ and later called ‘the House of the Goddess Baba’, for which see Karahashi 2016.
50. Chattel slavery, the keeping of slaves as property in private households, was so deeply rooted in the economy and society of classical Greece that many feel justified in defining Greek cities as ‘slave societies’. We find no obvious equivalent to this in ancient Mesopotamia. Temples and palaces held prisoners of war and debt defaulters as slaves or semi-free workers, who performed manual tasks such as grain-grinding or porterage all year round for food rations and owned no land of their own. Even then, they formed only a minority of the workforce in the public sector. Outright chattel slavery also existed, but played no comparably central role in the Mesopotamian economy; see Gelb 1973; Powell (ed.) 1987; Steinkeller and Hudson (eds) 2015: passim.
51. Jacobsen 1943; see also Postgate 1992: 80–81.
52. Barjamovic 2004: 50 n.7.
53. Fleming 2004.
54. As John Wills (1970) noted long ago, something of the conduct of assemblies is likely preserved in the speeches ascribed to gods and goddesses in Mesopotamian myth. The deities too convene to sit in assemblies, where they exhibit skills of rhetoric, persuasive speech, logical argumentation and occasional sophistry.
55. Barjamovic 2004: 52.
56. One such ‘urban village’, as Nicholas Postgate (1992: 81–2) terms it, is documented in a tablet recovered from the city of Eshnunna in the Diyala valley, which lists Amorites ‘living in the city’ according to their wards, designated by the names of male family heads and their sons.
57. See e.g. Van de Mieroop 1999, especially p. 123.
58. Ibid. 160–61.
59. Stone and Zimansky 1995: 123.
60. Fleming 2009: 1–2.
61. Fleming (2009: 197–9) notes the ‘tradition [at Urkesh] of a powerful collective balance to leadership by kings may be the inheritance of a long urban history’, and that the council of elders cannot possibly be construed as part of the king’s own circle of advisors. It was rather an ‘entirely independent political force’ of some antiquity, a collective form of urban leadership, which ‘cannot be regarded as a minor player in a primarily monarchic framework’.
62. To reconstruct early urban political systems in Mesopotamia, Jacobsen relied especially on the story of ‘Gilgamesh and Agga’, a brief epic composition about the war between Uruk and Kish, which describes a city council divided into two chambers.
63. Hence population estimates for the fourth millennium BC city are based almost entirely on topographical surveys and distributions of surface finds (see Nissen 2002).
64. Nissen, Damerow and Englund 1993.
65. Englund 1998: 32–41; Nissen 2002. A significant number of the monumental structures on the Eanna complex are spectacularly enlarged versions of a common household type (the so-called ‘tripartite house’ form) which is ubiquitous in villages of the preceding ‘Ubaid period of the fifth millennium BC . Specialists debate whether some of these buildings might have been private palaces rather than temples, but in fact they don’t resemble later palaces or temples very much. In essence, they are up-scaled versions of traditional house forms, where meetings of large numbers of people probably took place in the idiom of an extended family under the patronage of a deity-in-residence (Wengrow 1998; Ur 2014). The first compelling examples of palace architecture in cities of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium come only centuries later, in the Early Dynastic period (Moorey 1964).
66. See Crüsemann et al. (eds) 2019 for a magnificent survey of Uruk’s architectural development over the ages; although we note that their interpretation plays down those aspects of urban planning we would see as clearly relating to civic participation (especially with regard to the early phases of the Eanna sanctuary they tend to assume, even in the absence of written evidence, that any sort of grand architectural project must necessarily have been intended to establish the exclusivity of a ruling elite).
67. Among them are early copies of the so-called ‘Titles and Professions List’, which was widely reproduced in later times and includes (among other things) terms for various kinds of judges, mayors, priests, chairs of ‘the assembly’, ambassadors, messengers, overseers of flocks, groves, fields and farming equipment, and also of potting and metalworking. Nissen, Damerow and Englund (1993: 110–11) review the immense difficulties of extracting any kind of social history from such documents, which depends on finding corroborations between particular terms and their recurrence in functional administrative texts of the same period, and even then is somewhat tendentious.
68. Though we should also note that, at least by Old Babylonian times (c .2000–1500 BC ), much scribal instruction also went on in private households.
69. Englund 1988.
70. Bartash 2015. There is a possibility some were already slaves or war captives at this time (Englund 2009), and as we’ll see, this becomes much more commonplace later; indeed, it is possible that what was originally a charitable organization gradually transformed as captives were added to the mix. For the demographic composition of the temple workforce in the Uruk period see also Liverani 1998.
71. Another aspect of quality control in urban temples was the use of cylinder seals. These tiny, near-indestructible carved stones are our main source of knowledge for about 3,000 years of image-making in the Middle East, from the time of the first cities to the Persian Empire (c .3500–500 BC ). They had many functions, and were not simply ‘art objects’. In fact, cylinder seals were among the earliest devices for mechanically reproducing complex images, done by rolling the seal on to a strip or block of clay to make raised figures and signs appear, so they stand at the beginning of print media. They were impressed on inscribed clay tablets, but also marked clay stoppers of jars containing food and drink. In this way, tiny images of people, animals, monsters, gods and so on were made to guard and authorize the contents, which distinguished the otherwise standard products of temple and later palace workshops and guaranteed their authenticity as they passed among unknown parties (see Wengrow 2008).
72. Some Assyriologists once believed this sphere encompassed almost everything: that the first Mesopotamian cities were ‘temple states’ governed on the basis of ‘theocratic socialism’. This thesis has been convincingly refuted; see Foster 1981. We don’t really know what economic life was like outside the area administered by the temples; we just know that the temples administered a certain portion of the economy, but not all, and that they had nothing like political sovereignty.
73. On the Uruk Vase the figure of the goddess, probably Inanna, is larger than the males who march towards her. The only exception is the figure who approaches her directly, at the head of the parade, which is mostly lost due to a break in the vessel but is most likely the same standard male figure that appears on cylinder seals and other monuments of the time with his characteristic beard, hair gathered into a chignon, and long woven garments. It is impossible to tell what status this male figure refers to, or if it was occupied on a hereditary or rotating basis. The goddess wears a long robe, which almost completely disguises the contours of her body, while the smaller male figures appear nude, and arguably sexualised (Wengrow 1998: 792; Bahrani 2002).
74. See Yoffee 1995; Van de Mieroop 2013: 283–4.
75. See Algaze 1993. There is no hint of these colonies in the administrative correspondence of the mother-city (and writing was hardly used in the colonies themselves).
76. In essence, these were the sacred origins of what we now call commodity branding; see Wengrow 2008.
77. See Frangipane 2012.
78. Helwig 2012.
79. Frangipane 2006; Hassett and Sağlamtimur 2018.
80. Treherne 1995: 129.
81. Among the more remarkable finds from the Early Bronze Age cemetery at Başur Höyük in eastern Anatolia is an early set of sculpted gaming pieces.
82. Largely as predicted, in fact, by Andrew Sherratt (1996); and see also Wengrow 2011. Where urban and upland societies converged, a third element emerged which resembles neither the tribal aristocracies nor the more egalitarian cities. Archaeologists know this other element as the Kura-Araxes or Transcaucasian culture, but it has proved hard to define in terms of settlement types, which vary widely within it. For archaeologists, what identifies the Transcaucasian culture above all is its highly burnished pottery, which achieved a remarkable distribution extending south from the Caucasus as far as the Jordan valley. Over such considerable distances, methods for making pottery and other distinctive craft products stayed remarkably constant, suggesting to some the migration of artisans, and perhaps even whole communities, to settle in remote locations. Such diaspora groups seem to have been widely involved in the circulation and working of metals, especially copper. They carried with them certain other distinctive practices such as the use of portable cooking hobs, sometimes decorated with faces, which supported lidded pots used to prepare a cuisine based on stews and casseroles: a somewhat eccentric practice in regions where roasting and baking food in fixed ovens was an age-old practice going back to Neolithic times (see Wilkinson 2014, with further references).
83. Recent work attributes the eventual decline of the Indus civilization to changes in the flood regime of the major river systems, prompted by alterations in the monsoon cycle. This is most evident in the drying-up of the Ghaggar-Hakra, once a major course of the Indus, and a shift of human settlement to more easily watered areas where the Indus meets the rivers of Punjab, or to parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain which still fell within the catchment of the monsoon belt; Giosan et al. 2012.
84. For a review of the debates see Green (2020), who develops an argument that the Indus civilization was a case of egalitarian cities, but along rather different lines to our own.
85. For general overviews of the Indus civilization, and further description of the major sites, see Kenoyer 1998; Possehl 2002; Ratnagar 2016.
86. For an overview of the Indus valley’s far-flung commercial and cultural contacts in the Bronze Age see Ratnagar 2004; Wright 2010.
87. For the Indus script in general see Possehl 1996; for the Dholavira street-sign, Subramanian 2010; and for the function of Indus seals, Frenez 2018.
88. See Jansen 1993.
89. Wright 2010: 107–10.
90. See Rissman 1988.
91. Kenoyer 1992; H. M.-L. Miller 2000; Vidale 2000.
92. ‘The Indus Civilization is something of a faceless sociocultural system. Individuals, even prominent ones, do not readily emerge from the archaeological record, as they do in Mesopotamia and Dynastic Egypt, for example. There are no clear signs of kingship in the form of sculpture or palaces. There is no evidence for a state bureaucracy or the other trappings of “stateness”.’ (Possehl 2002: 6)
93. Daniel Miller’s (1985) perceptive discussion of these points remains important.
94. As discussed by, among others, Lamberg-Karlovsky 1999. It is sometimes objected that viewing the Bronze Age civilization of the Indus valley through the lens of caste means painting an artificially ‘timeless’ picture of South Asian societies, and thus slipping into ‘orientalist’ tropes, because the earliest written mention of the caste system and its basic social distinctions or varnas occurs only around a millennium later, in the hymns of the Rig Veda . In many ways, it’s a puzzling – and to some extent self-defeating – objection, because it only makes sense if one assumes that a social system based on caste principles cannot itself evolve, in the same way that, say, class or feudal systems undergo important structural transformations over time. There are, certainly, those who have explicitly taken this position (most famously, Dumont 1972). Obviously, however, that is not the position we are taking here; nor do we see any continuity in this context between caste, language and racial identity (another false equation, which has hampered these kinds of discussions in the past).
95. On this point see Vidale’s important (2010) reassessment of Mohenjo-daro and its archaeological record.
96. The general scarcity of weapons from Harappan sites remains striking; but as Corke (2005) points out, in other Bronze Age civilizations (e.g. Egypt, China, Mesopotamia) weaponry tends to be found in burials rather than settlements; so – he reasons – the visibility of weapons and warfare in the Indus valley may be greatly reduced by an overall lack of funerary remains. As he also points out, though, there is no evidence that weapons were used as symbols of authority (by contrast with Mesopotamia, for instance) or in any way formed ‘a significant part of elite identity’ in the Indus civilization. What is definitely absent is the glorification of weapons and the kind of people who employ them.
97. Obviously, it’s partly just the desire to preserve the credit for having ‘invented’ democracy for something called ‘the West’. Part of the explanation might also lie in the fact that academia itself is organized in an extremely hierarchical fashion, and most scholars therefore have little or no experience of making democratic decisions themselves, and find it hard to imagine anyone else doing so as a result.
98. Gombrich 1988: 49–50, 110 ff. See also Muhlenberg and Paine 1996: 35–6.
99. As with all such cases, just about everything on the topic of early Indian ‘democracy’ is contested. The earliest literary sources, the Vedas, assume a society that’s entirely rural, and that monarchy is the only possible form of government – though some Indian scholars detect traces of earlier democratic institutions (Sharma 1968); however, by the time of Buddha in the fifth century BC the Ganges valley was home to a host of city-states, small republics and confederations, many of which (the gana-sangha) appear to have been governed by assemblies made up of all male members of the warrior caste. Greek travellers like Megasthenes were perfectly willing to describe them as democracies, since Greek democracies were basically the same thing, but contemporary scholars debate how democratic they really were. The entire discussion seems to be premised on the assumption that ‘democracy’ was some sort of remarkable historical breakthrough, rather than a habit of self-governance that would have been available in any historical period (see, for example, Sharan 1983; Thapar 1984; our thanks to Matthew Milligan for guiding us to relevant source material, although he bears no responsibility for the use we’ve made of it).
100. On the seka principle see Geertz and Geertz 1978; Warren 1993.
101. Lansing 1991.
102. As argued in Wengrow 2015.
103. Possehl 2002: passim; Vidale 2010.
104. Independent cities were only entirely abolished in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as part of the creation of the modern nation state. European empires, and the creation of the modern interstate system in the twentieth century, succeeded in wiping out any traces of them in other parts of the world.
105. Bagley 1999.
106. Steinke and Ching 2014.
107. Interestingly, some of the smallest are in Henan itself, the heartland of the later named dynasties. The town of Wangchenggang, associated with the Xia Dynasty – the semi-legendary precursor to the Shang – has a total walled area of around thirty hectares; see Liu and Chen 2012: 222.
108. Ibid.: passim; Renfrew and Liu 2018.
109. Some scholars initially suggested that the Longshan period was an age of high shamanism, an appeal to the later myth of Pan Gu, who prised heaven and earth apart in such a way that only those with spiritual powers could journey between them. Others at first related it to classical legends of wan guo, the period of Ten Thousand States, before power was localized to the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties; see Chang 1999.
110. Jaang et al. 2018.
111. He 2013: 269.
112. Ibid.
113. He 2018.
1. The precise location of Aztlán is unknown. Various lines of evidence suggest that populations speaking Nahuatl (the language of the Mexica/Aztec) were dispersed among both urban and rural settings before their southward migration. Most likely they were present, alongside a range of other ethnic and linguistic groups, in the Toltec capital of Tula, which lies north of the Basin of Mexico (Smith 1984).
2. So-called for the founding political union of three city-states: Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan.
3. Mexica kings claimed partial descent from the Toltec rulers of a city called Culhuacan, where they sojourned in the course of their migrations, whence the ethnonym Culhua-Mexica; see Sahlins 2017.
4. Stuart 2000.
5. See Taube 1986; 1992.
6. Published estimates range as high as 200,000 and drop down to as low as 75,000 people (Millon 1976: 212), but the most thorough reconstruction to date (by Smith et al. 2019) rounds off at 100,000 and relates to the Xolalpan-Metepec phases of the city’s occupation, between c .AD 350 and 600. At that time, much of the population – both rich and poor – lived in fine masonry apartment blocks, as we’ll go on to discuss.
7. In fact, it’s quite likely some form of writing system was used at Teotihuacan, but all we can see of it are isolated signs, or small groups, repeated on wall paintings and pots where they caption human figures. Perhaps one day they will yield answers to some of the burning questions about the society that built Teotihuacan, but for the moment they remain largely inscrutable. Scholars can’t even tell yet, with any degree of confidence, if the signs name individuals or groups, or perhaps places of origin; for recent and sometimes contradictory discussions see Taube 2000; Headrick 2007; Domenici 2018. It is quite possible, of course, that the residents of Teotihuacan produced more extensive inscriptions on media that have not survived, such as the ephemeral reed or bark paper (amatl) later used by Aztec scribes.
8. Other immigrants came to Teotihuacan from as far as Veracruz and Oaxaca, forming their own residential quarters and nurturing their traditional crafts. We should probably imagine at least some of the city’s many districts as so many ‘Chiapas-towns’, ‘Yucatán-towns’, and so on; see Manzanilla 2015.
9. For the cosmological and political significance of ball-courts in Classic Maya cities see Miller and Houston 1987.
10. See Taube 1986.
11. It is worth noting, in passing, that rather similar arguments were made by the archaeologist and art historian Henri Frankfort (1948; 1951) with regard to the emergence of Egypt and Mesopotamia as parallel, but in some ways opposite, types of civilization; see also Wengrow 2010.
12. Pasztory 1988: 50; and see also Pasztory 1992; 1997.
13. Millon 1976; 1988: 112; see also Cowgill 1997: 155–6; and for more recent arguments, on similar lines, see Froese, Gershenson and Manzanilla 2014.
14. Sharer 2003; Ashmore 2015.
15. See Stuart 2000; Braswell (ed.) 2003; Martin 2001; and for the recent and unprecedented discovery of Maya wall paintings at Teotihuacan see Sugiyama et al. 2019.
16. For Captain Cook as Lono see Sahlins 1985. Hernan Cortés attempted something similar in 1519 after some interpreted him as the second coming of Quetzalcoatl, the once and future king of the Aztecs, though most contemporary historians have concluded he and Moctezuma were really playing a game where none took the attribution particularly seriously. For other examples, and the general phenomenon of ‘stranger-kings’, see also Sahlins 2008; Graeber and Sahlins 2017.
17. Based on chemical analysis of human remains from an adult male found in the Hunal Tomb at Copan, which suggest an origin for its occupant – identified as the dynastic founder K’inich Yax K’uk Mo’ – in the central Petén region (Buikstra et al. 2004).
18. Cf. Cowgill 2013. Some later conquistadors played a similar role, such as the notorious Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán (c .1490–1558), who started his career in the Spanish court as a bodyguard of Charles V before going on to found cities in northwest Mexico, where he ruled as founder-tyrant.
19. Parallels with the fifth century AD seem striking, but again no scholarly consensus exists on how to interpret the evidence connecting these two Tollans of Chichén Itzá and Tula (see Kowalski and Kristan-Graham 2017).
20. Millon 1964.
21. Plunket and Uruñuela 2005; see also Nichols 2016.
22. Froese, Gershenson and Manzanilla 2014.
23. Carballo et al. (2019: 109) note that domestic architecture from this early phase of Teotihuacan’s expansion is very poorly understood. Such traces as have been found suggest irregular and unimposing dwellings, erected on posts rather than stone foundations. See also Smith et al. 2017.
24. See Manzanilla 2017.
25. Arguably, the whole affair has a strong millenarian flavour when set against the backdrop of mass displacements and the loss of former homes to natural disasters; cf. Paulinyi 1981: 334.
26. Pasztory 1997: 73–138; and for more up-to-date accounts of the various construction phases, with associated radiocarbon determinations, see S. Sugiyama and Castro 2007; N. Sugiyama et al. 2013.
27. Sugiyama 2005. And for detailed studies of humans remains and their origins see also White, Price and Longstaffe 2007; White et al. 2002.
28. Cowgill 1997: 155.
29. See Cowgill 2015: 145–6.
30. Sugiyama and Castro 2007. Froese et al. (2014: 3) note that the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon may have been considered as ‘large-scale public goods on a continuum with the constructions of large-scale housing for most of the population’.
31. Carballo et al. 2019; cf. Smith et al. 2017.
32. Pasztory (1992: 287) observed, ‘No other common people in Mesoamerican history lived in such houses’, though as we shall see, the case of social housing at Teotihuacan is not as isolated as once thought.
33. See Manzanilla 1993; 1996.
34. Millon 1976: 215.
35. Manzanilla 1993.
36. Froese et al. 2014: 4–5; cf. Headrick 2007: 105–6, fig. 6.3; Arnauld, Manzanilla and Smith (eds) 2012. A significant number of these larger three-temple complexes lie at various points along the Way of the Dead, while others are distributed among the residential zones of the city.
37. Giveaways include dizzying colour contrasts, fractal arrangements of organic forms that merge into one another, and intense geometrical patterning, bordering on kaleidoscopic.
38. Most famously, in the murals from the apartment compounds of Tepantitla district, which also show ball games played in open civic spaces rather than courts (as we discuss further in Chapter Ten). See Uriarte 2006; and also Froese et al. 2014: 9–10.
39. Isolated elements of glyphic writing may complicate this picture, designating specific groups or individuals, although on what criteria exactly is still unknown; Domenici 2018.
40. Manzanilla 2015.
41. Domenici (2018: 50–51), drawing on the work of Richard Blanton (1998; Blanton et al. 1996), proposes a plausible sequence of developments whereby tensions grew between civic responsibilities and the interests of largely self-governing neighbourhoods. Some form of privatization is envisaged, undermining the collective ethos or ‘corporate ideology’ of earlier times.
42. As pointed out by the historian Zoltán Paulinyi (1981: 315–16).
43. Mann 2005: 124.
44. For an important but still quite isolated exception see the works by Lane F. Fargher and colleagues cited below.
45. Cortés 1928 [1520]: 51.
46. For which, see Isaac 1983.
47. Crosby 1986; Diamond 1997.
48. In sixteenth-century Mexican city-states (or altepetl), these urban wards called calpolli enjoyed considerable autonomy. Calpolli were ideally organized into symmetrical sets, with reciprocal rights and duties. The city as a whole worked on the basis of each calpolli taking its turn to fulfil the obligations of municipal government, rendering its share of tribute, workers for corvée service and personnel to staff the higher ranks of political office, including – in the case of royal cities – the office of tlatoani (king, or literally ‘speaker’). Special land allotments often went along with official roles, to support the incumbent administrator, and had to be surrendered at the end of a term. This opened up positions of authority to those who lacked hereditary estates. Calpolli also existed outside cities – in rural settlements and small towns – where they may have corresponded more closely to extended kin units; within cities they were often defined administratively by their shared responsibilities for delivering tithes, taxes and corvée, but also sometimes along ethnic or occupational lines, or in terms of shared religious duties, or even origin myths. Rather like the English term ‘neighbourhood’, calpolli seems to have become a nebulous concept in the modern scholarly literature, potentially covering an enormous variety of social forms and units; see Lockhart 1985; Fargher et al. 2010; Smith 2012: 135–6 and passim.
49. For the literary context of Cervantes de Salazar’s writings on New Spain see González González 2014; and also Fargher, Heredia Espinoza and Blanton 2010: 236, with further references.
50. Nuttall 1921: 67.
51. Ibid. 88–9.
52. If any of this seems somewhat unlikely, we would ask the reader to consider that the 1585 manuscript of Diego Muñoz Camargo’s remarkable Historia de Tlaxcala, which in fact comprises three sections – one textual, in Spanish, and two pictographic, in Spanish and Náhuatl – effectively vanished from sight for around two centuries and was not registered at all in the comprehensive survey of Mesoamerican manuscripts undertaken in 1975. It eventually resurfaced in a collection bequeathed to the University of Glasgow by Dr William Hunter in the eighteenth century, and a facsimile edition was produced only in 1981.
53. Courtesy of Biblioteca Virtual Universal, Buenos Aires, the reader can find a digital edition of Cervantes de Salazar’s text, Crónica de la Nueva España, at: http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/cronica-de-la-nueva-espana--0/html/
54. Xicotencatl the Younger, or Xicotencatl Axayacatl, was initially cast as a traitor in both Spanish colonial and Tlaxcalteca accounts; according to Ross Hassig (2001) his rehabilitation and reputation as an indigenous fighter against the Spanish only took place after Mexico declared independence.
55. We paraphrase here from the Spanish. We are not aware of any authorized translation of these words into English. Incidentally, Xicotencatl the Elder was quite right about all this: it didn’t take long after the conquest of Tenochtitlan for Tlaxcala to lose its privileges and exemptions with the Spanish Crown, reducing its populace to just another source of tribute.
56. Hassig (2001: 30–32) provides a summary of the standard account, drawing mainly on Bernal Díaz del Castillo; he also considers possible factors behind the Spanish execution of Xicotencatl the Younger, who died by hanging at the age of thirty-seven.
57. The possibility that Kandiaronk, whom the Jesuits considered to rank among the smartest people that ever lived, might himself have learned about some of Lucian’s best lines in his conversations with the French, been impressed, and deployed variations of them in later debate is one that seems utterly inconceivable to such scholars.
58. See Lockhart, Berdan and Anderson 1986; and for Nahuatl traditions of direct speech and political rhetoric, also Lockhart 1985: 474.
59. MacLachlan (1991: xii and n.12) is fairly typical in this regard when commenting on the ‘remarkable adjustment’ of Tlaxcalteca members of the council to (supposedly) European mores, which he attributes almost entirely to native self-interest under conditions of imperial domination.
60. For a useful discussion of shifting scholarly opinion on such matters, Lockhart (1985) remains valuable.
61. As, for instance, with academic responses to the so-called ‘Influence Debate’, which we touch on in a later chapter, triggered by the proposal that Haudenosaunee federal structures (the Six Nations of the Iroquois) might have been one model for the US Constitution.
62. Motolinía 1914 [1541]: 227. Even if we can’t always establish direct links between the surviving texts of de Salazar, Motolinía and other chroniclers, it seems safe to assume that by the 1540s there would have been any number of bilingual Nahuatl and Spanish speakers in large centres like Tlaxcala, exchanging stories about the deeds and sayings of their notable recent ancestors.
63. Gibson 1952; and see also Fargher, Heredia Espinoza and Blanton 2010: 238–9.
64. On Chichimec see also Sahlins 2017, with further references.
65. Balsera 2008.
66. Fargher et al. 2011.
1. Lévi-Strauss (1987) referred to Northwest Coast societies as ‘house’ societies, that is, ones where kinship was organized around noble households, which were precisely the holders of titles and heirloom treasures (as well as slaves, and the loyalty of retainers). This arrangement seems typical of heroic societies more generally; the palace at Arslantepe, which we described in Chapter Eight, is most likely just a more elaborate version of the same thing. There is a direct line from here to what Weber called ‘patrimonial’ and ‘prebendal’ forms of governance, where entire kingdoms or even empires are imagined as extensions of a single royal household.
2. This again is easy to observe in activist groups, or any group self-consciously trying to maintain equality between members. In the absence of formal powers, informal cliques that gain disproportionate power almost invariably do so through privileged access to one or another form of information. If self-conscious efforts are made to pre-empt this, and make sure everyone has equal access to important information, then all that’s left is individual charisma.
3. This definition held sway for a long time in Europe. It is why medieval England could begin holding elections to select parliamentary representatives as far back as the thirteenth century; but it never occurred to anyone that this had something to do with ‘democracy’ (a term which, at the time, was held in near-total disrepute). It was only much more recently, in the late nineteenth century, when men like Tom Paine came up with the idea of ‘representative democracy’ that the right to weigh in on spectacular competitions among the political elite came to be seen as the essence of political freedom, rather than its antithesis.
4. Definitions that ignore sovereignty have little currency. One could argue, hypothetically, that the essence of ‘statehood’ is a system of governance with at least three tiers of administrative hierarchy, staffed by professional bureaucrats. But by that definition we would have to define the European Union, UNESCO and the IMF as ‘states’, and this would be silly. They are not states by any common definition, precisely because they lack sovereignty and make no claim to it.
5. Which is not, of course, to say that they didn’t make grandiose claims to territorial sovereignty; just that careful analysis of the ancient written and archaeological sources shows these claims to be generally hollow; see Richardson 2012.
6. On ‘Early Bronze Age urbanism and its periphery’ in western Eurasia see also Sherratt 1997: 457–70; and more generally, Scott’s (2017: 219–56) reflections on ‘The golden age of the barbarians’.
7. This pattern much resembles Weber’s famous notion of ‘the routinization of charisma’, where the vision of a ‘religious virtuoso’, whose charismatic quality was based explicitly on presenting a total break with traditional ideas and practices, is gradually bureaucratized in subsequent generations. Weber argued that this was the key to understanding the internal dynamics of religious change.
8. Nash 1978: 356, citing Soustelle (1962), citing Bernardino de Sahagún’s Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España .
9. Dodds Pennock (2017: 152–3) discusses a revealing episode in 1427, when Aztec visitors to a Tepanec banquet were made to dress as women on the orders of the Maxtla (the Tepanec ruler) in order to humiliate both them and their own ruler, who had of late failed to avenge the rape of Aztec women by Tepanec in the market at Coyoacan; things came full circle two years later, when Aztec armies entered Atzcapotzalco and sacrificed Maxtla to the gods.
10. As reported, for example, in the memoirs of Bernal Díaz (in Maudslay’s translation), see among others the section on Complaints of Montezuma’s tyranny: ‘but they [the local chiefs] said that Montezuma’s tax gatherers carried off their wives and daughters if they were handsome and ravished them, and this they did throughout the land where the Totonac language was spoken.’ See also Townsend 2006; Gómez-Cano 2010: 156.
11. Dodds Pennock (2008) situates the public practice of religious violence within broader Aztec notions of gender, vitality and sacrifice; and see also Clendinnen 1991.
12. See Wolf 1999: 133–96; Smith 2012.
13. For general overviews of the Inca Empire and its archaeological remains see Morris and van Hagen 2011; D’Altroy 2015.
14. Murra 1982.
15. Ayllu, as we will discuss again later in the chapter, were land-holding groups, bound by ties of descent that cut across households. Their original function was to manage the redistribution of labour within, and sometimes between, villages, so no household was left to fend for itself. The kind of tasks usually taken on by ayllu corporations were routinely necessary, but fell beyond the capacity of a typical nuclear household: such things as clearing fields, harvesting crops, managing canals and reservoirs, porterage or fixing bridges and other buildings. Importantly, the ayllu organization also acted as a support system for families who found themselves unable to obtain the basic material requirements of lifecycle rituals – chicha for funerals, houses for newly married couples and so on. See Murra 1956; Godoy 1986; Salomon 2004.
16. Gose 1996; 2016.
17. See Kolata 1992; 1997.
18. Silverblatt 1987; and cf. Gose 2000.
19. Urton and Brezine 2005.
20. Hyland 2016.
21. Hyland 2017.
22. Clendinnen 1987.
23. Maya writings from the early colonial period, such as the books of Chilam Balam, almost invariably treat the Spanish not as the actual government but as irritating interlopers, and rival factions of Maya nobility – engaged in ongoing struggles for influence that the supposed conquerors appear to have been entirely unaware of – as still constituting the real government (Edmonson 1982).
24. Just how much else remains to be discovered is highlighted by new (LiDAR ) techniques for mapping tropical landscapes, which recently led experts to triple their estimates for the Classic Maya population; see Canuto et al. 2018.
25. See Martin and Grube 2000; Martin 2020.
26. For a tentative reconstruction of how Maya rulership evolved out of earlier forms of shamanic power see Freidel and Schele 1988.
27. In the absence of definitive evidence, theories of collapse have tended to follow the political concerns of their day. During the Cold War, many Euro-American Mayanists seemed to assume some kind of class conflict or peasant revolution; since the 1990s there has been more of a tendency to focus on ecological crises of one sort or another as the main causal factor.
28. Ringle 2004; see also Lincoln 1994. These reconstructions remain hotly debated (see Braswell (ed.) 2012), but if broadly correct, even in outline, they would correspond to what Graeber and Sahlins (2017) describe as a shift from ‘divine’ to ‘sacred’ forms of kingship, or even ‘adverse sacralisation’.
29. Kowaleski 2003.
30. And for K’iche parallels see Frauke Sachse: ‘The Martial Dynasties – the Postclassic in the Maya Highlands’, in Grube et al. (eds) 2001: 356–71.
31. Kubler 1962.
32. Kroeber (1944: 761) began his grand conclusion as follows: ‘I see no evidence of any true law in the phenomena dealt with; nothing cyclical, regularly repetitive, or necessary. There is nothing to show either that every culture must develop patterns within which a florescence of quality is possible, or that, having once so flowered, it must wither without chance of revival.’ Neither did he find any necessary relation between cultural achievement and systems of government.
33. In continental Europe, there’s an entire category of scholarship known as ‘proto-history’ which describes the study of peoples like the Scythians, Thracians or Celts, who briefly break into the light of history through the writings of Greek or Roman colonizers, only to fizzle back out again when the literate gaze turns elsewhere.
34. In their additional cultic role as the ‘god’s hand’ the wives of Amun – such as Amenirdis I and Shepenupet II – were also obliged to assist the male creator-god in acts of cosmic masturbation; so, in ritual terms, she was as subordinate to a male principal as one could possibly imagine, while in reality running a good portion of Upper Egypt’s economy and calling political shots at court. Judging by the grand locations of their funerary chapels at Karnak and Medinet Habu, the combination made for some very effective realpolitik.
35. See John Taylor’s chapter on ‘The Third Intermediate Period’ in Shaw (ed.) 2000: 330–69, especially 360–62; also Ayad 2009.
36. Schneider 2008: 184.
37. In The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Shaw ed. 2000), for instance, the relevant chapter is called ‘Middle Kingdom Renaissance (c .2055–1650 BC ).’
38. For a useful summary see Pool 2007.
39. Rosenwig 2017. Again, this picture is liable to change quite dramatically with the application of LiDAR survey techniques in the provinces of Tabasco and Veracruz, which is already under way at the time of writing.
40. See Rosenwig 2010.
41. Attention to individual differences and personal aesthetics is also evident in a second major category of Olmec sculpture, most abundantly documented at San Lorenzo. It depicts human figures with unusual or anomalous features, including images of hunchbacks, dwarfs, lepers and possibly also images based on people’s observations of miscarried embryos; see Tate 2012.
42. See Drucker 1981; Clark 1997; Hill and Clark 2001.
43. See Miller and Houston 1987.
44. Hill and Clark 2001. It’s of more than passing interest, in this context, that Teotihuacan – governed on more collective principles than Olmec, Maya or Aztec cities – had no such arena for the official staging of ball games. Excluding a public ball-court from the municipal plan must surely have been a deliberate choice, since many of Teotihuacan’s occupants would have been familiar with such spectacles, and as we saw in Chapter Nine, nearly everything else in the city centre was laid out with exacting foresight and precision. When ball games do appear at Teotihuacan, it’s in a different context. So very different, that one begins to suspect some conscious inversion of ideas that were canonical in the surrounding kingdoms of Oaxaca and the Maya lowlands (recalling that people moved regularly between these regions and were familiar with the practices of their neighbours).
The evidence comes from domestic wall paintings in one of Teotihuacan’s well-appointed housing estates, known as Tepantitla. Gods are depicted, but also the earliest known images of people playing ball games with their feet, hands and sticks – something on the lines of soccer, basketball and hockey (see Uriarte 2006). All this was in violation of aristocratic norms. The scenes have a street setting, with large numbers of participants all shown at the same scale. Associated with these scenes is a recurrent symbolism of water lilies, a powerful hallucinogen. Perhaps what we are seeing here is something peculiar to Teotihuacan; or perhaps we are glimpsing something of the games played by ordinary folk throughout Mesoamerica, a side of life that is largely invisible to us in more stratified polities.
45. Clendinnen 1991: 144.
46. In this respect, Wilk’s (2004) stimulating comparison between the dynamics of the Olmec horizon and the cultural/political impact of modern beauty pageants, such as Miss World and Miss Universe, seems very apposite. Geertz coined the phrase ‘theatre state’ (1980) to describe Balinese kingdoms, where, he suggested, the entire apparatus of tribute basically existed for the purpose of organizing spectacular rituals, rather than the other way round. His argument has some notable weaknesses – especially as seen from the perspective of Balinese women – but the analogy may still be helpful, especially when one considers the original role of those famous Balinese cock fights (familiar to any first-year anthropology student); they were initially promoted and staged by royal courts as a way of putting people into debt, which not infrequently led to one’s wife and children being handed over to the palace for use as slaves or concubines, or for onward sale abroad (Graeber 2011: 157–8, 413 n.88).
47. As we saw in Chapter Eight.
48. See Conklin and Quilter (eds) 2008.
49. See Isbell 2008.
50. See Quilter 2002; Castillo Butters 2005.
51. Cf. Weismantel 2013.
52. These are precisely the sort of highly complex images studied by the anthropologist Carlo Severi (2015) in his classic analysis of the ‘chimera principle’.
53. Burger 2011; Torres 2008. The stone carvings at Chavín de Huántar seem mostly concerned with making permanent what were inherently ephemeral experiences of altered states of consciousness. Animal motifs typical of Chavín art – such as felines, snakes and crested eagles – actually occur up to 1,000 years earlier on cotton textiles and in beadwork, which already circulated widely between the highlands and the coast. Interestingly, more fully preserved textiles from later periods show that, even at the height of Chavín’s power, coastal societies were approaching their deities in explicitly female forms (Burger 1993). At Chavín de Huántar itself, women appear to be absent from the surviving repertory of figural sculpture.
54. Rick 2017.
55. See Burger 2008.
56. See Weismantel 2013.
57. For a more detailed discussion of the divine kingship of the Natchez, with full references, see Graeber’s chapter ‘Notes on the Politics of Divine Kingship’, in Graeber and Sahlins 2017: 390–98.
58. Cited in Graeber, ibid. p. 394.
59. Lorenz 1997.
60. See Gerth and Wright Mills (eds) 1946: pp. 233–4.
61. Brown 1990: 3, quoting John Swanton’s Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico (1911) (Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 43).
62. For a good summary of such royal ‘exploits’ see de Heusch 1982; the king most famous for gunning down his own subjects was the Ganda King Mutesa, who was trying to impress David Livingstone after the latter presented him with the gift of a rifle, but it’s by no means a unique event: see Simonse 1992; 2005.
63. Graeber and Sahlins 2017: 129.
64. Crazzolara 1951: 139.
65. Reported in Diedrich Westermann’s Shilluk People: their Language and Folklore (1911). Philadelphia: Board of Foreign Missions of the United Presbyterian Church of North America, p. 175.
66. Graeber and Sahlins 2017: 96, 100–101, 130.
67. We will be considering such possibilities further in the next chapter.
68. Actually, we are being disingenuous here. This is not just a thought experiment: the remains of the Great Village – now known to archaeologists as the Fatherland Site, in Adams County – were in fact excavated, notably by Stu Neitzel in a few intermitted seasons of fieldwork, during the 1960s and early 1970s. In the centuries since its abandonment, what was left of the site had been covered by up to ten feet of colluvial mud deposited by the St Catherine Creek, which first had to be removed with heavy machinery (bulldozers), playing havoc with the archaeological remains below and obliterating key evidence. What Neitzel (1965; 1972) reported accords in broad outline with what we have just described; no doubt, more careful and modern techniques could do a lot better in terms of archaeological reconstruction (cf. Brown 1990).
69. In fact, early excavations in the vicinity of Mound C, the likely location of the Natchez temple, did turn up more than twenty burials with grave goods including objects of French as well as local manufacture; but their excavation was poorly conducted, with no systematic documentation, and they likely date to the very final period of temple use, just before the building was razed, and when the power of the Great Sun was no doubt already much diminished (see Brown 1990: 3; Neitzel 1965, reporting finds made by Moreau B. C. Chambers in 1930).
70. Egyptologists refer to the First and Second Dynasties as Egypt’s ‘Early Dynastic’ period while the ‘Old Kingdom’ – somewhat confusingly – begins only in the Third Dynasty.
71. See Dickson 2006; Morris 2007; Campbell (ed.) 2014; Graeber and Sahlins 2017: 443–4, with further references.
72. For the latter possibility, and a review of earlier interpretations, see Moorey (1977); but for an alternative view, which sees them as true royal burials, see Marchesi 2004.
73. Campbell 2014.
74. Cf. Campbell 2009.
75. Although perhaps not the only tombs, since Egypt’s earliest rulers may occasionally have split their ancestors’ bodies up, burying them in more than one location to distribute their mortuary cult as widely as possible; see Wengrow 1996: 226–8.
76. Wengrow 1996: 245–58; Bestock 2008; see also Morris 2007; 2014.
77. Macy Roth 2002.
78. Maurice Bloch (2008) has observed, in a similar vein, that early states almost invariably involve an explosion of spectacular and often apparently random violence, and that the final result of such states is to ‘disorganize’ the ritual life of ordinary households in a way that, somehow, can never be put back to how it was even if those states collapse. It’s from this dilemma, he argues, that the phenomenon of universalizing religion emerges.
79. One effect of this was to create a series of ‘no-man’s-lands’ around Egypt’s territorial borders. For example, the political separation of Egypt from once closely related lands and peoples in Sudan seems to have involved the depopulation of territories on Egypt’s newly established southern boundary, and the dismantling of a former apparatus of chiefly power within Nubia: the so-called A-Group, as archaeologists call it. This took place in an act of violent domination, commemorated in a rock carving at Gebel Sheikh Suleiman on the Second Cataract. So, in effect, we have a kind of symmetry between extremes of ritual killing at the centre of the new Egyptian polity (on the occasion of a ruler’s demise) and the foundational violence taking place, or commemorated, on its territorial frontiers; Baines 2003; Wengrow 2006: passim .
80. For which see Lehner 2015.
81. Wengrow et al. 2014.
82. Jones et al. 2014. Neolithic burials were usually located in the arid margins of the Nile valley (areas dry enough to afford a certain amount of natural preservation for the corpse), and sometimes further into adjacent desert lands; they seem not to have had any sort of durable superstructures, but were often laid out in large cemeteries, and other lines of evidence show that people remembered, revisited and reused the same locations over a period of generations; see Wengrow 2006: 41–71; Wengrow et al. 2014.
83. Indeed, Egyptologists had long noted certain elements of later kingship showing up in art far ‘too early’ – for instance, the famous Red Crown of Lower Egypt appears on a piece of pottery dated almost 1,000 years before the Red and White Crowns were combined to become an official symbol of Egyptian unity; the standard motif of a king wielding a mace to smite his foes crops up in a painted tomb at Hierakonpolis, 500 years before the Narmer Palette, and so on. See Baines 1995 for further examples and references.
84. Recent Nilotic peoples have tended to be strictly patrilineal; this, actually, does not entirely exclude women from taking on prominent positions, but generally they do so by playing the part of men. Among the Nuer, for instance, a ‘bull’ or village leader with no male heir can simply declare his daughter a man, and she might well take over his position, even marry a woman and be recognized as father of her children. It’s probably no coincidence that in Egyptian history as well, women who took on dominant positions often did so by declaring themselves, effectively, males (a notable exception to this being the god’s wives of Amun, whom we discussed earlier in this chapter).
85. See Wengrow 2006: Chapters One, Four and Five; Kemp 2006; Teeter (ed.) 2011. Population estimates for these ‘proto-kingdoms’ remain highly speculative due to the inaccessibility of ancient living quarters and the burial of large areas of prehistoric settlement beneath modern field systems and floodplains.
86. See Friedman 2008; 2011.
87. See Wengrow 2006: 92–8.
88. Ibid.: 142–6.
89. Integration of large-scale chicha consumption into lifecycle rituals was not actually an Inca innovation – it traces back to the expansion of Tiwanaku, midway between Chavín (with its very different ritual comestibles) and the Inca; see Goldstein 2003.
90. See Murra 1956: 20–37.
91. Wengrow 2006: 95, 160–63, 239–45, with further references.
92. Lehner 2015.
93. See also Roth 1991.
94. Symbolic and likely also practical associations between monumental architecture and the activities of ships’ crews are also suggested for the later Bronze Age stone temples of Byblos (Jbeil) in Lebanon, a port town with close trading and cultural links to Egypt (see Wengrow 2010b: 156); and ethnographic descriptions of how team-skills transfer from boat-handling to the manipulation of heavy stone-work can be found, for instance, in John Layard’s classic ethnography of a Melanesian island, Stone Men of Malekula (1942). London: Chatto and Windus.
95. The production line analogy is inspired by Lewis Mumford on the ‘megamachine’, where he famously argued that the first complex machines were in fact made of people. The ‘rationalization’ of labour typical of the factory system was, as scholars like Eric Williams long ago suggested, really pioneered on slave plantations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but others have recently pointed out that ships around that time, both merchant and military, seem to have been another major zone of experimentation, since being on board such vessels was one of the few circumstances where large numbers of people were assigned tasks entirely under a single overseer’s command.
96. As pointed out by feminist theorists (e.g. Noddings 1984).
97. It is worth recalling here that in the tombs of some of Egypt’s highest-ranking officials, during the Old Kingdom, we find among their most important titles not just military, bureaucratic and religious offices but also duties such as ‘Beloved Acquaintance of the King’, ‘Overseer of the Palace Manicurists’, and so on (Strudwick 1985)
98. Compare Baines 1997; 2003; Kolata 1997.
99. For the different forms of Egyptian and Mesopotamian kingship see Frankfort 1948; Wengrow 2010a; for rare exceptions to this pattern, in which Mesopotamian kings appear to have claimed divine or near-divine status, see the contributions by Piotr Michalowski and Irene Winter in Brisch (ed.) 2008, both stressing the exceptional and ambivalent nature of such claims.
100. This situation persisted even in later Mesopotamian history: when Hammurabi erected a stela with his famous law code in the eighteenth century BC, this might have seemed the quintessential sovereign act, decreeing how violence could and could not be used within the king’s territories, creating a new order out of nothing; but in fact most of these grand edicts appear never to have been systematically enforced. Babylonian subjects continued to use the same complex patchwork of traditional legal codes and practices they had before. Moreover, as the decorative scheme of the stela makes clear, Hammurabi is acting on the authority of the sun-god Shamash; see Yoffee 2005: 104–12.
101. And here we can draw a further contrast with Mesopotamia, where administration was an established feature of earthly government, but the cosmos – far from being predictably organized – was inhabited by gods whose actions (like those of the biblical Yahweh) often came in the form of unexpected interventions, and frequently chaotic ruptures in human affairs; Jacobsen 1976.
102. Other examples of regimes where sovereignty and competitive politics dominated the earthly sphere, and administrative hierarchies were projected on to the universe, might include many South Asian societies, which exhibit a similar fascination with cosmic cycles, and medieval Europe, where the Church and its image of angelic hierarchies seems to have preserved a memory of the old legal-bureaucratic order of ancient Rome.
103. Martin and Grube 2000: 20; Martin 2020.
104. See Bagley 1999.
105. Shaughnessy 1989.
106. Appeal to divination is limited in Egypt before the New Kingdom, and had an ambivalent role in Inca systems of government. As Gose (1996: 2) explains, in the Inca case oracular performances were actually at odds with the personal authority of living kings. They centred instead on the mummified bodies of royal ancestors or their statue equivalents, which provided one of the few venues for expressing subaltern (and potentially subversive) views, in a manner that did not challenge the assumption of the ruler’s absolute sovereignty and supreme authority. In a similar way, in Renaissance times, to take a king or queen’s horoscope was often considered to be an act of treason. Maya kings used bloodletting and stone-tossing as forms of divination, but they do not seem to have been of central importance to affairs of state.
107. Yuan and Flad 2005. Outside the sphere of literacy, divination with animal parts was also widely practised.
108. See Keightley 1999.
109. Shaughnessy 1999.
110. Shang China might well be considered the paradigm for what the anthropologist Stanley Tambiah (1973) has described as ‘galactic polities’, also the most common form in later Southeast Asian history, where sovereignty concentrated at the centre and then attenuated outwards, focusing in some places, fading in others to the point where, at the edges, certain rulers or nobles might actually claim to be part of empires – even distant descendants of the founders of empires – whose current ruler had never heard of them. We can contrast this sort of outward proliferation of sovereignty with another kind of macro-political pattern, emerging first in the Middle East and then gradually across much of Eurasia, where diametrically opposed notions of what actually constitutes ‘government’ would face off against each other in dynamic tension, creating the great frontier zones that separated bureaucratic regimes (whether in China, India or Rome) from the heroic politics of nomadic peoples which threatened constantly to overwhelm them; for which see Lattimore 1962; Scott 2017.
111. The clearest illustration of this royal theme from the Old Kingdom is to be found in the reliefs surviving from Sahure’s mortuary temple at Abusir; see Baines 1997.
112. Baines 1999.
113. See Seidlmayer 1990; Moreno García 2014.
114. Translation as per Seidlmayer 1990: 118–21. Especially striking, in this regard, are the nomarch’s claims to keep his people not just healthy, but also provided with the basic necessities for a full social life: the resources to sustain a family, conduct proper funerals, and the guarantee that one would not be cut loose from one’s local moorings or condemned to live as a refugee.
115. Dunbar 1996: 102; Diamond 2012: 11. This assumption is enshrined both in the kind of ‘scalar stress’ theories we discussed at the start of Chapter Eight, and also in a certain strand of evolutionary psychology (see also Dunbar 2010), which argues that bureaucracy supplies the administrative solution to problems of information storage and management, arising when societies scale up beyond a certain threshold of face-to-face interaction. Bureaucracy, according to such theories, acts as a kind of ‘external symbolic storage’ when the innate capacities of the human mind for storing and recalling information (e.g. relating to the flow of commodities or labour) are overtaxed. So far as we are aware, there is absolutely no empirical evidence to support this hypothetical but deeply ingrained reconstruction of the ‘origins of bureaucracy’.
116. Interestingly, the archival records of the nineteenth-century Merina kingdom of Madagascar are much the same: the kingdom was conceived in patrimonial terms as a royal household, and each descent group’s true nature was defined by the service they performed for the king, who was often imagined as a child, with the people as his or her nursemaids. The records go into endless and exact detail concerning every item that passed in and out of the royal household to maintain the ruler, but are otherwise almost silent on economic affairs (see Graeber, ‘The People as Nursemaids of the King,’ in Graeber and Sahlins 2017).
117. Akkermans (ed.) 1996.
118. See Schmandt-Besserat 1992.
119. Oddly, very few such seals have been found at Tell Sabi Abyad itself, perhaps because they were made of materials that have not survived such as wood; miniature stamp seals made of stone, and of the kind we are referring to here, are quite ubiquitous on other northern Mesopotamian sites of the same (‘Late Neolithic’ or ‘Halaf’) period.
120. Akkermans and Verhoeven 1995; Wengrow 1996.
121. The suggestion – sometimes voiced – that all this was a result of part of the population being absent from the village during the herding season, when they took their flocks to graze on nearby hillsides (a practice called transhumance), is probably much too simplistic. It also doesn’t make a great deal of sense – there were still the elderly, spouses, siblings and offspring left in the village to look after property or report problems.
122. See Wengrow 2010a: Chapter Four.
123. Wengrow 1998: 790–92; 2001.
124. This is of course somewhat ironic, since archaeologists working within older frameworks of social evolution had long assumed that ‘Ubaid societies must have been organized into some sort of ‘complex chiefdoms’, simply because they are chronologically located between the earliest farming settlements and the earliest cities (which, in turn, are assumed to usher in the ‘the birth of the state’). The logical circularity of such arguments will by now be very obvious, as will their lack of fit to the archaeological evidence for the periods in question.
125. Murra 1956: 156.
126. See, especially, Salomon 2004. It may be observed in passing that market systems in medieval villages in England appear to have worked in much the same way, though less formally: the vast majority of transactions were on credit, and every six months to a year a collective accounting was held in an effort to cancel all debts and credits back to zero (Graeber 2011: 327).
127. Salomon 2004: 269; Hyland 2016. It is possible that string-based counting techniques may also have been used in prehistoric Mesopotamia, in conjunction with clay symbols and stamp seals, as demonstrated by evidence for the suspension of perforated lumps of clay, shaped into regular forms and sometimes bearing impressed signs or symbols (Wengrow 1998: 787).
128. See Wernke 2006: 180–81, with further references.
129. For the mode of organization and labour tribute schedules see Hyland 2016.
130. John Victor Murra in his magisterial thesis on The Economic Organization of the Inca State (1956), cites Spanish sources who tell of local misanthropes and misfits elevated to new positions of authority; of neighbours turning against each other; and debtors uprooted from their villages – though one can never be sure how much of this was a result of the conquista itself; see also Rowe 1982.
131. For which see Debt: The First 5000 Years, by one of the authors of the present volume (Graeber 2011); and also Hudson 2018.
132. Von Dassow 2011: 208.
133. Murra (1956: 228) concludes that the illusion of the Inca state as socialistic derives from ‘ascribing to the state what was actually an ayllu function’. ‘Security for the incapacitated was provided by an age-old, pre-Incaic system of automatic access to community assets and surpluses as well as reciprocal labour services,’ he goes on: ‘There may have been some state relief in the case of major frost and drought; the references to this are late and very few compared to the hundreds that describe the use of reserves for military, court, church and administrative purposes.’ Probably, this is overstated, since the Inca also inherited administrative structures and an apparatus of social welfare from some of the kingdoms they conquered, so the reality must surely have varied from place to place (S. Rockefeller, personal communication).
134. See, for example, Richardson (2012) on Mesopotamia, and Schrakamp (2010) on the seasonal dimensions of early dynastic military organization; Tuerenhout (2002) on seasonal warfare among the Classic Maya; and for further examples and discussion see contributions to Neumann et al. (eds) (2014); Meller and Schefik (2015).
135. James Scott (2017: 15) makes a similar observation at the beginning of his book Against the Grain: ‘In a good part of the world, the state, even when it was robust, was a seasonal institution. Until very recently, during the annual monsoons in Southeast Asia, the state’s ability to project its power shrank back virtually to its palace walls. Despite the state’s self-image and its centrality in most standard histories, it is important to recognize that for thousands of years after its first appearance, it was not a constant but a variable, and a very wobbly one at that in the life of much of humanity.’
136. Buoyed, perhaps, by the illusion common to so many who claim arbitrary power, that the fact that you are able to kill your subjects is somehow equivalent to having given them life.
137. In a brilliant and under-appreciated book called Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), James Scott makes the point that whenever one group has overwhelming power over another, as when a community is divided between lords and serfs, masters and slaves, high-caste and untouchable, both sides tend to end up acting as if they were conspiring to falsify the historical record. That is: there will always be an ‘official version’ of reality – say, that plantation owners are benevolent paternal figures who only have the best interest of their slaves at heart – which no one, neither masters or slaves, actually believes, and which they are likely to treat as self-evidently ridiculous when ‘offstage’ and speaking only to each other, but which the dominant group insists subordinates play along with, particularly at anything that might be considered a public event. In a way, this is the purest expression of power: the ability to force the dominated to pretend, effectively, that two plus two is five. Or that the pharaoh is a god. As a result, the version of reality that tends to be preserved for history and posterity is precisely that ‘official transcript’.
138. Abrams 1977.
139. See also Wengrow 2010a.
140. As pointed out, for example, by Mary Harris (1997); recall here also that the centralized knowledge systems of Chavín, the Classic Maya and other pre-Columbian polities may well have rested on a continent-wide system of mathematics, originally calculated with the aid of strings and cords, and hence grounded ultimately in fabric technologies (Clark 2004); and that the invention of cuneiform mathematics in cities was preceded by some thousands of years of sophisticated weaving technologies in villages, echoes of which are preserved in the forms and decoration of prehistoric ceramic traditions throughout Mesopotamia (Wengrow 2001).
141. Renfrew 1972.
142. A chronological scheme, widely used by archaeologists for the entire island, starts with the ‘Pre-palatial’, moving on to ‘Proto-palatial’, ‘Neo-palatial’ and so on.
143. Whitelaw 2004.
144. See Davis 1995.
145. Preziosi and Hitchcock 1999.
146. We should perhaps mention here Arthur Evans’s notorious identification of a ‘priest-king’ among the painted figures he uncovered at Knossos at the turn of the twentieth century (for which see S. Sherratt 2000). In fact, the various bits of decorated wall relief Evans used to piece this image together came from different archaeological strata, and probably never belonged to a single figure (he himself thought this to begin with, but changed his mind). Even the gender of the priest-king is now questioned by art historians. But the more basic question is why anybody would want to seize on a single, possibly male figure with an impressive plumed hat as evidence for kingship, when the overwhelming majority of Minoan pictorial art is pointing us in another direction altogether. We will follow it in a moment. But in short, the priest-king of Knossos is no better contender for a throne than his similarly named and similarly isolated counterpart at the earlier Bronze Age city of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley, whom we encountered in Chapter Eight.
147. Younger 2016.
148. ‘It is certain’, Evans wrote, ‘that, however much the male element had asserted itself in the domain of government by the great days of Minoan Civilization, the stamp of Religion still continued to reflect the older matriarchal stage of social development.’ (cited in Schoep 2018: 21)
149. For a detailed discussion of early Egyptian imports to Crete, via Lebanon, and their likely association with women’s rituals see Wengrow 2010b.
150. Voutsaki 1997.
151. Palaces only called in tribute on certain specific goods – such as flax, wool and metals – which were converted into a still more specific range of items in palace workshops, mainly fine textiles, chariots, weapons and scented oils. Other major industries, such as pottery manufacture, are entirely missing from the administrative records. See Whitelaw 2001.
152. See Bennett 2001; S. Sherratt 2001.
153. Kilian 1988.
154. Rehak 2002.
155. Groenewegen-Frankfort 1951.
1. Uncultivated, quite literally, for as Montesquieu put it, perhaps most succinctly: ‘These people enjoy great liberty; for as they do not cultivate the earth, they are not fixed: they are wanderers and vagabonds…’ (Spirit of the Laws, 18: 14 – ‘Of the political State of the People who do not cultivate the Land’).
2. Lovejoy and Boas 1965.
3. Scott 2017: 129–30.
4. Ibid.: 135.
5. Ibid.: 253.
6. Sahlins and Service 1960.
7. The closest we have to a historical comparison is economic: the Socialist Bloc, which existed from roughly 1917 to 1991 and at its peak encompassed a fair amount of the world’s land mass and population, is often treated as a (failed) experiment in this sense. But some would argue that it was never really independent from the larger capitalist world system, but simply a subdivision of state capitalism.
8. We are drawing here on examples discussed at greater length in Debt: The First 5000 Years (Graeber 2011: Chapter Nine), which describes these co-ordinated changes largely in terms of the alternation between physical (gold and silver) currency and various forms of abstract (intangible) credit money.
9. For a general overview of Cahokia see Pauketat 2009.
10. Williams 1990.
11. Severi (2015) discusses evidence for the use of pictographic writing systems among the indigenous peoples of North America, and why their characterization as ‘oral’ societies is misleading in many ways.
12. JR (1645–6) 30: 47; see also Delâge 1993: 74.
13. Carr et al. 2008.
14. Knight 2001; 2006.
15. Sherwood and Kidder 2011.
16. ‘The Archaic measuring unit appears to have survived into the Adena period … but Woodland peoples employed a different system of measurement and geometric forms … derived, at least in part, from Formative Mesoamerica … The system used a shorter measuring cord (1.544 m) for the Standard Unit and its permutations, but it otherwise preserved many of the traditional counts and arithmetic … Also, reliance on triangles was replaced by the use of square grids, and circles and squares, at various SMU [Standard Macro Unit] increments, as is so evident in Hopewell earthwork.’ (Clark 2004: 205, with further references)
17. Yerkes 2005: 245.
18. Specialists have come to refer to this as the Pax Hopewelliana; for a general review, as well some occasional exceptions in the form of trophy skulls, see Seeman 1988.
19. See Carr and Case (eds) 2005; Case and Carr (eds) 2008: passim .
20. Contemporary scholars list at least nine clans among the ‘Tripartite Alliance’ of sodalities in the central Hopewell region: Bear, Canine, Feline, Raptor, Raccoon, Elk, Beaver, Nonraptorial Bird and Fox. These correspond roughly to the largest clans documented among Central Algonkian peoples who still inhabit the region (Carr 2005; Thomas et al. 2005: 339–40).
21. As one might imagine, this has been a matter of some debate, but we follow here the extensively documented views put forward in Carr and Case (eds) 2005, with further detailed references.
22. DeBoer 1997: 232: ‘I view Hopewell earthwork sites as ceremonial centres, places where various activities, including mortuary rituals and other activities such as feasts, causeway-directed foot races and other “games,” as well as dances and gambling were conducted periodically in the absence of large permanent populations resident at the centres themselves.’ On burial: Seeman 1979.
23. See Coon (2009) on the north/south distinction; he also notes that in the south, burials are mostly collective and undifferentiated, and treasures are buried apart from bodies, not identified with specific individuals. The art shows figures in costume, dressed as monsters, rather than individuals wearing headdresses as at Hopewell. All this suggests a more self-consciously egalitarian, or at least anti-heroic, ideology in the south. On the pairing of shamanic and earth shrine sites see DeBoer 1997; on gender and office see Field, Goldberg and Lee 2005; Rodrigues 2005. Carr (in Carr and Case 2005: 112) speculates that the north/south division might reflect a distinction between the ancestors of later, patrilineal Great Lakes Algonkians and the matrilineal Southeastern societies (Cree, Cherokee, Choctaw, etc); but the pattern reflected in tombs seems far more radical: aside from some male mortuary priests, all major office holders in the south appear to be women. Rodrigues’s (2005) analysis of skeletal remains suggests even more surprising differences in the south, where ‘women also participated in maintenance and subsistence activities more commonly done by Native American men, including flint knapping and running possibly involved in hunting. Inversely, men shared in processing plant foods, stereotypically associated with women.’ (Carr, in Case and Carr eds 2008: 248). It is rather surprising that these findings have not been more broadly discussed.
24. On the causeway: Lepper 1997.
25. As we discussed in Chapter Four, the monumental hunter-gatherer centre of Poverty Point on the Lower Mississippi drew in objects and materials from a similarly wide region almost 2,000 years earlier, and it may well have disseminated various forms of intangible goods and knowledge far and wide in return; but Poverty Point had a different character to Hopewell, tightly focused on a single centre of gravity, and less clearly marked by the spread of social institutions such as burial rituals or settlement patterns.
26. Between 3500 and 3200 BC a cultural spread of similar scope, but very different character, also preceded the emergence of the first large territorial kingdom in Egypt; this is often referred to in the literature as a ‘cultural unification’ that preceded political unification, although in fact much of that unification between the valley and delta of the Nile seems to have been confined to the sphere of funerary rituals and their associated forms of personal display (Wengrow 2006: 38, 89).
27. Seeman 2004: 58–61.
28. For a more detailed argument on these lines see Braun (1986).
29. DeBoer 1997.
30. Hudson 1976: passim . Residents of New York City might be interested to know that Broadway was originally an Indian road, and that Astor Place, where it begins, was the shared lacrosse field for the three nations that occupied Manhattan.
31. On Rattlesnake Causeway and mound and the origins of Cahokia see Baires 2014; 2015; on Cahokia’s beginnings as place of pilgrimage, Skousen 2016.
32. Chunkey appears to have been modelled on a popular children’s game called Hoop and Pole. On the origins of chunkey and its later role see DeBoer 1993; Pauketat 2009: Chapter Four.
33. A later observer of the Choctaw recorded: ‘Their favorite game of chunké … they play from morning till night, with an unwearied application, and they bet high; here you may see a savage come and bring all his skins, stake them and lose them; next his pipe, his beads, trinkets and ornaments; at last his blankets and other garments, and even all their arms, and after all it is not uncommon for them to go home, borrow a gun and shoot themselves.’ (Romans, cited in Swanton 1931: 156–7). At the time of European contact, such extreme sports seem to have acted as a levelling mechanism, since few stayed on top for long and even those who sold themselves don’t seem to have remained that way for very long.
34. Pauketat 2009: 20. The literature on Cahokia is vast. In addition to the general overviews we have already cited see also Alt 2018; Byers 2006; Emerson 1997a; Fowler 1997; Milner 1998; Pauketat 1994; 2004; and essays in Emerson and Lewis 1991; Pauketat and Emerson (eds) 1997; for the environmental context, Benson et al. 2009; Woods 2004.
35. Emerson et al. 2018.
36. Smith 1992: 17.
37. Emerson 1997a; 1997b: 187; cf. Alt 2018. Pauketat et al. (2015: 446) refer to this as a process of ‘ruralization’.
38. Betzenhauser and Pauketat 2019. As Emerson notes (1997b), between AD 1050 and 1200, surveillance was also extended into the countryside through the establishment of what he terms ‘civic nodes’, which seem to have performed a mixture of ritual and managerial functions; see also Pauketat et al. 2015: 446–7.
39. Originally identified as the central burial of two males, flanked by retainers; but see now Emerson et al. 2016 for the true complexity of this deposit, which lies within the tumulus known to archaeologists as Mound 72, some way south of the Great Plaza.
40. Fowler et al. 1999 reported the mass graves as all-female, but in fact the picture is again more complex; see now Ambrose et al. 2003; Thompson et al. 2015.
41. Knight 1986; 1989; Knight et al. 2011; Pauketat 2009: Chapter Four; for other possible readings of the bird-man symbolism see Emerson et al. 2016.
42. Emerson 2007; 2012.
43. The precise reasons behind Cahokia’s collapse are hotly contested; for a range of views see Emerson and Headman 2014; Kelly 2008, with further references.
44. See Cobb and Butler 2002.
45. For a range of views on the latter issue, compare Holt 2009; Pauketat 2007; and see also Milner 1998.
46. For which, at Cahokia, see Smith 1992; Pauketat 2013.
47. Cf. Pauketat et al. 2015: 452.
48. La Flesche 1921: 62–3; Rollings 1992: 28; Edwards 2010: 17.
49. See King 2003.
50. King 2003; 2004; 2007; Cobb and King 2005.
51. In Clayton et al. (eds) 1993: 92–3.
52. As argued in Ethridge 2010.
53. Ibid.: 33–7, 74–7. The indigenous forms of republican government that emerged in the Southeast during the eighteenth century also presumed a certain relationship with nature, but this was in no sense one of harmony. Ultimately, it was a relation of war. Plants were human allies and animals were enemies; killing prey without following correct ritual formula was a violation of the laws of war, which would cause animals to send disease into human communities by way of revenge. Yet at the same time the business of hunting tended to be understood, especially by men, as representing a certain ideal of individual freedom.
54. Ibid.: 82–3.
55. The argument was put forward by Waskelov and Dumas but never published; it’s cited and discussed in Ethridge (2010: 83–4) and Stern (2017: 33), though in our opinion it makes the whole case backwards, seeing the ‘creation of new coalescent communities [and] … emergence of a more egalitarian, consensus-based social structure’ in the face of disasters caused by the European invasion, and only then the emergence of a new cosmology whose symbol was the looped square, representing the council-ground as the universe, as a sort of adaptation to this ‘new reality’. But how could self-conscious ideals of egalitarianism have emerged and been adopted at all, except through some sort of cosmological expression?
56. Fogelson 1984. There were, as Fogelson notes, and as we’ll soon see, Cherokee priests in the seventeenth century, though they were gradually replaced by individual curers. It’s hard not to see the legend as to some degree reflecting real historical events: Etowah, for instance, was in what later became Cherokee territory.
57. Coffee itself was first cultivated either in Ethiopia or Yemen; the American equivalent was called ‘the Black Drink’ and traces back to at least Hopewell times, when it was used in intense doses for ritual purposes (Hudson 1979; Crown et al. 2012). On Creek daily gatherings: Hahn 2004; Fairbanks 1979.
58. Brebeuf in JR 10: 219.
59. Certainly, the emerging soft drug regime in Europe – which was in many ways also the foundation of the emerging world economy of the time (founded, first on the spice trade, then on the drug, arms and slave trades), was quite different, since it focused so much on new regimes of work. While in the Middle Ages almost everyone had consumed mild intoxicants like wine or beer on a daily basis, the new regime saw a division between mild drugs meant to facilitate work – coffee and tea, especially used as vehicles for sugar, along with tobacco – and hard liquor for the weekends (see various contributions in Goodman, Lovejoy and Sherratt eds 1995).
60. In our terms, it’s not even clear that Adena-Hopewell was a ‘first-order regime of domination’; in most respects, as we’ve indicated, it seems closer to the kind of grand hospitality zones, culture areas, interaction spheres, or civilizations we’ve encountered so many times before in other parts of the world.
61. See Kehoe (2007) for an extensive comparison of ethno-historical data on the Osage with Cahokian archaeology (also Hall 1997). Their exact relationship with Cahokia is not archaeologically clear, however, and Robert Cook (2017) supplies the most recent breakdown of their origins in Fort Ancient, a Mississippianized region of central Ohio whose population seems to have interacted with the Cahokian heartland (see especially, pp. 141–2, 162–3).
62. La Flesche 1930: 530; Rollings 1992: 29–30; Bailey and La Flesche 1995: 60–62.
63. La Flesche 1921: 51.
64. Rollings 1992: 38; Edwards 2010.
65. La Flesche (1921: 48–9) writes: ‘In the course of this study of the Osage tribe, covering a number of years, it was learned from some of the older members of the Nohozhinga of the present day that, aside from the formulated rites handed down by the men of the olden days who had delved into the mysteries of nature and of life, stories also came down in traditional form telling of the manner in which these seers conducted their deliberations. The story that seemed most to impress the Nohozhinga of today is the one telling of how those men, those students of nature, gradually drifted into an organized association that became known by the name Nohozhinga, Little-Old-Men. As time went on this association found a home in the house of a man who had won, by his kindness and hospitality, the affection of his people … Since that time it has been regarded by prominent men as an honor to entertain them.’
66. La Flesche 1939: 34.
67. See above, n.1; and also Burns 2004: 37–8, 362. Burns himself is of partly Osage descent and was brought up as Osage. We find it striking how regularly indigenous authors are open to the possibility that such dialogues were two-way, and how quickly European historians, or Americans of European descent, dismiss any such suggestions as preposterous and effectively shut them down.
68. Parker 1916: 17; italics ours. It’s interesting to note that some early sources, like Josiah Clark, refer to the later figure of Adodharoh as ‘the king’, though alternatively as ‘principal civil affairs officer of the confederacy’ (in Henige 1999: 134–5).
69. It is worthy of note here that Arthur Parker describes Iroquois witches of his day as essentially those who have the power to turn themselves into monstrous beasts, and at the same time to bend others to their will through telepathic commands (Parker 1912: 27–8 n.2; cf. Smith 1888; Dennis 1993: 90–94; Shimony 1961: 261–88; 1970; Tooker 1964: 117–20). Mann also emphasizes the political nature of the designation: ‘the closest Iroquoian thought comes to European witchcraft is a general disgust with anyone who uses [charms] in an underhanded way, to trick another person into behaviour that is neither voluntary nor self-directed’ (Mann 2000: 318; cf. Graeber 1996 for a similar case in Madagascar, also focusing on love magic).
70. We are thinking here, particularly, of the arguments made by Robert Lowie and Pierre Clastres, discussed at various points in our earlier chapters.
71. For instance, the Haudenosaunee also claimed they were descended from a population of escaped serfs, subjugated by a numerically superior enemy whom they called the Adirondaks (‘Barkeaters’) (Holm 2002: 160). Subjugation and insurrection were in no sense entirely alien concepts here.
72. Trigger 1990: 136–7.
73. Ibid.: 137.
74. Fremin in Wallace (1958: 235): ‘The Iroquois have, properly speaking, only a single Divinity – the dream. To it they render their submission, and follow all its orders with the utmost exactness. The Tsonnontouens [Seneca] are more attached to this superstition than any of the others; their Religion in this respect becomes even a matter of scruple; whatever it be that they think they have done in their dreams, they believe themselves absolutely obliged to execute at the earliest moment. The other nations content themselves with observing those of their dreams which are the most important; but this people, which has the reputation of living more religiously than its neighbors, would think itself guilty of a great crime if it failed in its observance of a single dream. The people think only of that, they talk about nothing else, and all their cabins are filled with their dreams … Some have been known to go as far as Quebec, traveling a hundred and fifty leagues, for the sake of getting a dog, that they had dreamed of buying there…’. Wallace argues that this is a direct psychological consequence of the stoicism and importance of personal freedom and autonomy in Iroquoian societies. See also Blau 1963; Graeber 2001: 136–9.
75. The earlier dates are in reference to an eclipse mentioned in the foundation text (Mann and Fields 1997; cf. Henige 1999; Snow 1991; Atkins 2002; Starna 2008).
76. For the general state of archaeological understanding see Tuck 1978; Bamann et al. 1992; Engelbrecht 2003; Birch 2015. On the Ontario inception of maize cultivation: Johansen and Mann 2000: 119–20.
77. Mann and Fields 1997: 122–3; Johansen and Mann 2000: 278–9.
78. See Chapter Six.
79. Morgan 1851; Beauchamp 1907; Fenton 1949; 1998; Tooker 1978; on the role of women specifically: Brown 1970; Tooker 1984; Mann 1997; 1998; 2000.
80. Jamieson 1992: 74.
81. In Noble 1985: 133, cf. 1978: 161. There is some debate over how seriously to take the missionary claims about Tsouharissen: Trigger (1985: 223) for instance insists he was simply an unusually prominent war chief, but the preponderance of anthropological opinion seems weighted towards seeing the Neutral as a ‘simple chiefdom’.
82. Noble 1985: 134–42.
83. Parker 1919: 16, 30–32.
84. Lahontan 1990 [1703]: 122–4.
85. The story is told in some detail in Mann 2000: 146–52.
1. Sometimes he also used the phrase illud tempus; see, among many other works, Eliade 1959.
2. Hocart 1954: 77; see also Hocart 1969 [1927]; 1970 [1936].
3. On reflection, many of what we consider to be quintessential freedoms – such as ‘freedom of speech’ or ‘the pursuit of happiness’ – are not really social freedoms at all. You can be free to say whatever you like, but if nobody cares or listens, it hardly matters. Equally, you can be as happy as you like, but if that happiness comes at the price of another’s misery, it hardly amounts to much either. Arguably, the things often quoted as quintessential freedoms are based on the very illusion created by Rousseau in his second Discourse: the illusion of a human life that is solitary.
4. For which see Graeber and Sahlins 2017: passim .
5. Harari 2014: 133.
6. Scarry 1985.
7. Kelly 2000.
8. See Haas and Piscitelli 2013.
9. Patterson 1982.
10. For further discussion see Graeber 2011: 198–201 and the sources cited there.
11. One might imagine these public torments as wild or disorderly in their conduct; but in fact the preparation of a prisoner for sacrifice was one of the few occasions on which an office holder might issue commands for calm and orderly behaviour, as well as forbidding sexual intercourse. For all of the above see Trigger 1976: 68–75.
12. For a period of perhaps five centuries or more, human remains across the whole of Eastern North America display remarkably little evidence of traumatic injuries, scalping or other forms of interpersonal violence (Milner et al. 2013). Evidence for interpersonal violence and warfare exists in both earlier and later periods, the most famous later examples being a mass grave excavated at Crow Creek and an Oneota village cemetery with extensive evidence of trauma, both dating to around 700 years ago. Such evidence accounts for perhaps a few decades or more of social history – a century at most – and is fairly localized. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the entire region somehow existed in a Hobbesian state for millennia, as contemporary theorists of violence blandly assume.
13. Delâge 1993: 65–6.
14. See Merrick 1991.
15. In a (1995) article that has undoubtedly been influential, but still not nearly as influential as it deserves, Crumley pointed out the need for alternatives to hierarchical models of social complexity in archaeological interpretation. As she noted, the archaeological record is full of evidence for the development of social and ecological systems that were complex and highly structured, just not according to hierarchical principles. ‘Heterarchy’ – the umbrella term she introduced for those other types of systems – was borrowed from cognitive science. Many of the societies we’ve focused on in this book – from Upper Palaeolithic mammoth hunters to the shifting coalitions and confederacies of sixteenth-century Iroquoia – could be described in these terms (had we chosen to adopt the language of systems theory), on the basis that power was dispersed or distributed in flexible ways across different elements of society, or at different scales of integration, or indeed across different times of year within the same society.
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David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He was the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler . He was an iconic thinker and a renowned activist, and his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020. You can sign up for email updates here .
David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of several books, including What Makes Civilization? Wengrow conducts archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle East. You can sign up for email updates here .
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